SEX 


AND 


EDUCATION. 


TO 


DR.  E.  H.  CLARKE'S  "SEX   IN 


EDITED,   WITH  AN   INTRODUCTION, 


BY   MRS.   JULIA    WARD.  HOWE. 


BOSTON: 

ROBERTS     BROTHERS. 
1874. 


Entered  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  year  1874,  by 

ROBERTS      BROTHERS, 

office  of  the  Librarian  of  Congress,  at  Washington. 

7/  fr  2..T 


Cambridge: 
Press  of  John  Wilson  and  Son. 


CONTENTS. 


PACK 

INTRODUCTION 5 

ART. 

I.    JULIA  WARD  HOWE 13 

II.    THOMAS  WENTWORTH  HIGGINSON.     (From  the 

"Woman's  Journal,"  Nov.  8  and  15,  1873.)     .  32 

III.  MRS.  HORACE  MANN 52 

IV.  ADA  SHEPARD  BADGER 72 

V.    CAROLINE  H.  DALL 87 

VI.    BY  C 109 

VII.    ELIZABETH  STUART  PHELPS 126 

VIII.    FROM  "BOSTON  DAILY  ADVERTISER"  ....  139 

IX.    MERCY  B.  JACKSON 150 

X.    PROFESSOR  BASCOM 164 

XI.    ABBY  W.  MAY 170 

XII.    MARIA  A.  ELMORE  ....'. 174 

XIII.    A.  C.  GARLAND.     (From  "  Providence  Journal.")  183 

TESTIMONY  FROM  COLLEGES 191 

Vassar  College 191 

Antioch  College 196 

Michigan  University .    .    .     .  199 

Lombard  University 201 

Oberlin  College 202 


— 

-—  THK      ' 

XTtfivi 


INTRODUCT 


I  DO  not  know  that  I  can  better  introduce 
this  volume  than  by  saying  that  it  contains 
the  views  of  a  number  of  thoughtful  persons, 
chiefly  women,  upon  the  matters  treated  of 
in  Dr.  EDWARD  H.  CLARKE'S  work  entitled 
44  Sex  in  Education,"  and  upon  the  book 
itself.  Nearly  all  the  papers  here  presented 
were  contributed  to  various  publications  soon 
after  the  appearance  of  that  book  ;  several 
of  them  have  been  revised  by  their  authors. 
Each  is  an  independent  expression  of  opin- 
ion, modified  by  no  plan  or  intention  of 
subsequent  combination.  The  general  agree- 
ment in  their  tenor,  and  the  permission 
to  republish  them  at  this  time  and  in  this 
form,  afford  the  only  ground  upon  which 


6  INTRODUCTION. 

the  Editor  can  assume  to  speak  for  their 
authors.  Her  "we"  therefore  must  be 
taken  with  this  limitation. 

Most  of  the  writers  are  experienced  in 
the  office  of  tuition,  and  in  the  observa- 
tion of  its  effects.  All  of  them  have 
had  occasion  to  form  their  own  theories 
of  what  is  desirable  for  the  improvement 
of  the  condition  of  women.  The  facts 
and  experience  of  their  lives  have  led 
them  far  from  Dr.  Clarke's  conclusions. 
To  most  of  them,  his  book  seems  to  have 
found  a  chance  at  the  girls,  rather  than  a 
chance  for  them.  All  could  wish  that  he 
had  not  played  his  sex-symphony  so  harshly, 
so  loudly,  or  in  so  public  a  manner.  But 
since  he  has  awakened  public  attention  with 
his  discovered  discord,  all  would  gladly  com- 
bine in  reassuring  mankind  of  the  compati- 
bility of  its  foremost  interests.  Dr.  Clarke's 
discord  exists  not  in  nature,  but  in  his  own 
thought.  An  appeal  to  the  great  laws  of 


INTRODUCTION.  7 

harmony  will  be  sure  to  solve  it,  and  set  it 
out  of  sight 

Most  of  us  feel  compelled  to  characterize 
this  book  in  one  aspect  as  an  intrusion  into 
the  sacred  domain  of  womanly  privacy.  No 
woman  could  publish  facts  and  speculations 
concerning  the  special  physical  economy  of 
the  other  sex,  on  so  free  and  careless  a  plane, 
without  incurring  the  gravest  rebuke  for 
insolence  and  immodesty.  And  yet  it  is 
important  that  mothers  should  know  enough 
of  these  to  guide  and  influence  their  sons 
in  the  right  direction.  But  no  man  could 
endure  the  thought  of  having  the  physical 
functions  peculiar  to  his  sex  so  unveiled 
before  the  common  sight  of  society,  so  sug- 
gested to  and  imposed  upon  its  common 
talk.  However,  then,  people  may  differ 
concerning  the  coarseness  or  refinement  of 
the  book,  all  must,  we  think,  agree  that  its 
method  violates  the  Christian  rule  of  doing 
to  others  exactly  as  we  would  have  them  do 
to  us. 


8  INTRODUCTION. 

Despite  Dr.  Clarke's  prominent  position 
in  this  community,  we  do  not  feel  compelled 
to  regard  him  as  the  supreme  authority  on 
the  subjects  of  which  he  treats.  .'The  ob- 
ject, then,  of  our  publication  is  twofold. 
First  and  foremost  we  wish  to  put  in  a  solid 
and  tangible  form  the  impression  which  his 
book  makes  upon  men  and  women  to  whom 
the  interests  of  Woman  and  of  Humanity 
have  long  been  the  theme  of  careful  study 
and  anxious  thought.  And  in  the  second 
place  we  desire  to  appeal  to  the  wisdom 
and  chivalry  of  the  two  professions  on  whose 
blended  domain  the  book  imposes  its  forced 
and  absolute  conclusions. 

To  those  most  eminent  in  physics  and 
in  sociology  we  would  say :  "  Take  the  so- 
cial mixture  of  to-day,  with  its  antecedents 
and  concomitants.  Analyze  it  fairly  and 
thoroughly;  and  then  tell  us  if  the  over- 
education  of  women  is  its  most  poisonous 
ingredient." 


INTRODUCTION.  9 

To  the  high  courts  of  education  we 
would  say :  "  Remodel  carefully  your  laws 
and  ordinances.  The  mischiefs  arising 
from  the  .'separation  of  the  sexes  during 
the  period  of  education  are  such  as  to 
make  their  co-education  imperative.  Youth 
cannot  be  driven  and  overworked  in  one 
sex  with  more  impunity  than  in  the  other. 
Boys  as  well  as  girls  break  down  under 
severe  study,  men  as  well  as  women,  and 
at  least  as  often.  Let  a  milder  and  more 
humane  regime  be  devised  and  enforced. 
No  one  loses  health  through  the  lessons 
of  wisdom  wisely  explained.  It  is  the  hur- 
ried, undigested  (also  indigestible)  tuition 
which  nauseates  and  fatigues.  Let  the 
community  be  careful  not  only  of  what  is 
taught,  but  of  how  it  is  taught.  And 
above  all,  in  view  of  the  good  of  society, 
let  not  man  and  woman,  who  are  to  be  part- 
ners in  all  the  earnest  tasks  of  life,  come 
forth  from  a  separate  and  unequal  disci- 


I0  INTRODUCTION. 

pline,  to  meet  as  strangers  in  their  fiery 
youth.  What  knowledge  of  character,  what 
insight  into  sympathy  and  compatibility, 
may  we  not  hope  to  find  among  young 
people  who  have  met  in  the  august  pres- 
ence of  wisdom  and  science;  who  have 
assisted  each  other,  not  in  the  mazes  of  a 
bewildering  dance,  but  in  noble  operations 
of  intellect,  in  unravelling  the  problems  of 
the  agesrin  building  the  structure  of  the 
social  world ! " 

And  to  parents  may  we  not  say :  Do  not 
longer  feel  obliged  to  surrender  your  daugh- 
ters, in  the  very  bloom  of  their  youthful 
powers,  to  the  unintelligent  dominion  of 
Fashion.  You  subject  them  to  the  extrava- 
gant, immodest  rules  of  display;  you  ex- 
pose them  to  the  intercourse  of  flattery  and 
folly,  to  the  poison  of  heated  and  crowded 
rooms,  late  hours,  and  luxurious  suppers. 
You  countenance  the  lavish  waste  of  time, 
talent,  sensibility,  and  money,  and  all  this 


INTRODUCTION.  1 1 

because  without  it  your  daughters  may  not 
marry.  And  with  it.  indeed,  they  may  not. 
Take  courage  then,  and  come  to  a  loftier 
stand.  Educate  the  future  wives  with  the 
future  husbands.  Give  the  two  in  common 
the  highest  enjoyments  and  the  happiest 
memories.  Then  shall  the  marriage  wreath 
crown  the  pair  in  its  true  human  dignity, 
never  to  be  displaced  or  lost. 

J.  w.  H. 


UNIVERSITY 


SEX     AND     EDUCA 


I. 


BY  JULIA  WARD   HOWE. 

WHEN  a  book  challenges  public  attention  to 
its  especial  object  and  intention,  we  may  not 
inappropriately  deal  with  it  before  we  consider 
its  author.  As  to  the  book,  then,  called  "  Sex 
in  Education,"  let  us  endeavor  to  make  up  our 
minds  concerning  its  character,  before  we  pass 
on  to  deal  with  the  topics  it  suggests. 

Is  the  book,  then,  a  work  of  science,  of  litera- 
ture, or  of  philosophy,  or  is  it  a  simple  practical 
treatise  on  the  care  of  health  ?  We  should  call 
it  none  of  these.  It  has  neither  the  impartiality 
of  science,  the  form  of  literature,  the  breadth 
of  philosophy,  nor  the  friendliness  of  counsel. 


I4  SEX  AND    EDUCATION. 

It  is  a  work  of  the  polemic  type,  presenting  a 
persistent  and  passionate  plea  against  the  admis- 
sion of  women  to  a  collegiate  education  in  com- 
mon with  men.  The  advisableness  of  such 
education  in  common  is  a  question  upon  which 
people  differ  greatly  in  opinion.  So  many  peo- 
ple of  conscience  and  intelligence  hold  opposite 
theories  concerning  this,  that  it  may  be  consid- 
ered as  a  question  fairly  open  to  discussion,  and 
asking  to  be  tested  in  the  light  of  experience. 
Dr.  Clarke  supports  his  side  of  the  argument  by 
a  statement  of  facts  insufficient  for  his  purpose, 
and  <by  reasonings  and  inferences  irrelevant  to 
the  true  lesson  of  these  facts.  He  makes  in 
the  first  place  a  strange  confusion  between 
things  present,  past,  and  future,  and  in  the  terror 
of  the  identical  education  to  come  sees  identical 
education  of  the  sexes  in  the  past  and  present 
as  the  cause  of  all  the  ills  that  female  flesh  is  2 
heir  to.  He  asserts  the  fact  of  an  ascertained 
and  ever  increasing  deterioration  in  the  persons 
of  American  women  from  the  true  womanly 
standard.  He  finds  them  tending  ever  more 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  j5 

and  more  towards  a  monstrous  type,  sterile  and 
sexless  ;  and  these  facts,  which  some  of  us  may 
strongly  doubt,  he  considers  accounted  for  by 
the  corresponding  fact  that  boys  and  girls  re- 
ceive the  same  intellectual  education.  *•  Accord- 
ing to  him,  you  cannot  feed  a  woman's  brain 
without  starving  her  body.  Brain  and  body  are 
set  in  antagonism  over  against  each  other,  and 
what  is  one  organ's  meat  is  another's  poison. 
Single  women  of  the  intellectual  type  he  char- 
acterizes very  generally,  not  only  as  agamai, 
but  as  agenes ;  and  his  portraiture  of  them  is 
sufficiently  revolting.  The  powerful  influence 
of  climate  is  lightly  estimated  by  him.  One 
hundred  years  would  be  insufficient  to  change 
the  stout,  heavily  boned  English  or  Irish  woman, 
with  her  abundant  covering  of  flesh,  into  the 
wiry,  nervous  Yankee  woman,  characterized  by 
nerve  and  brain,  The  cause  of  all  this,  of  the 
undeveloped  busts,  fragile  figures,  and  uncer- 
tain health  of  American  women,  resides  in  the 
fact  that  with  us,  as  he  says,  girls  and  boys 
receive  the  same  education. 


!6  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

The  periodical  function  peculiar  to  women  is 
a  point  upon  which  Dr.  Clarke  dwells  with  per- 
sistent iteration.  Its  neglect  he  considers  the 
principal  source  of  disease  among  the  women 
of  our  land.  Its  repression  or  over-produc- 
tion are  equally  fatal  to  health ;  and,  in  the 
years  which  nature  consecrates  to  its  establish- 
ment, the  recurrence  of  the  function  should  be 
observed  by  the  avoidance  of  bodily  and  men- 
tal fatigue.  Dr.  Clarke's  reasoning  upon  this 
point  affirms  that  American  women  neglect 
care  in  this  direction  beyond  all  other  women, 
and  that  the  school  education  which  our  girls 
receive  is  the  moving  cause  of  this  neglect. 

We  cannot  remember  a  single  point  in  Dr. 
Clarke's  diagnosis  of  American  female  hygiene 
which  is  not  included  in  the  present  rapid  rJ- 
sumtf.  The  Doctor's  prognosis  is  even  more  dis- 
mal and  unpromising.  Open  the  doors  of  your 
colleges  to  women,  and  you  will  accomplish 
the  ruin  of  the  Commonwealth.  Disease  —  al- 
ready, according  to  him,  the  rule  among  them 
—  will  become  without  exception.  Your  girls 


SEX  AND  ED  L/C  AT/ON.  ij 

will  lose  their  physical  stature,  and  your  boys 
their  mental  stature,  since  the  tasks  set  for  the 
latter  would  be  limited  by  the  periodical  dis- 
ability of  the  girls.  The  result  will  be  a  physi- 
cal and  sexual  chaos,  out  of  which  the  Doctor 
sees  no  escape  save  in  an  act  akin  to  the  rape 
of  the  Sabines.  Tennyson's  line  suits  with 
his  mood  :  — 

"  I  will  take  some  savage  woman,  she  shall  rear  my  dusky 
race." 

A  number  of  persons  have  commented  wisely 
and  wittily  upon  this  book  and  its  contents. 
There  is,  perhaps,  no  need  of  any  further  de- 
tailed criticism  of  its  scope  and  statement.  We 
have  endeavored  to  give  its  sense  and  spirit  in 
little.  And  we  will  supplement  this  synopsis 
by  giving  as  briefly  our  own  impressions  con- 
cerning these. 

To  begin  with  the  observance  of  the  periodi- 
cal function.  This  is  a  good  old  grandmotherly 
doctrine,  handed  down  from  parent  to  child 
through  all  the  ages  of  humanity.  Ignorance 
of  the  laws  of  health  would,  no  doubt,  in  all 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


ages,  induce  young  persons  to  disregard  the 
cautions  of  their  elders  on  this  as  on  other 
points  ;  and  the  sharp  proverb  which  tells  what 
young  people  think  of  old  people,  and  what  the 
latter  know  of  the  former,  must  often  recur  to 
the  minds  of  elderly  women  preaching  care  and 
prudence  to  daughters  and  nieces.  On  the 
whole,  if  a  pretty  wide  and  long  personal  expe- 
rience can  go  for  any  thing,  I  incline  to  think 
that  the  elder  generation  is  much  more  careful 
of  this  point  of  health  than  of  any  other.  Many 
young  women  who  are  allowed  to  eat,  dress,  live, 
and  behave  as  they  like,  are  periodically  kept 
from  all  violent  exercise  and  fatigue,  so  far  as 
the  vigilance  of  elders  can  accomplish  this.  The 
wilfulness  and  ingenuity  of  the  young,  however, 
are  often  more  than  a  match  for  this  vigilance  ; 
and  a  single  ride  on  horseback,  a  single  wetting 
of  the  feet,  or  indulgence  in  the  irresistible 
German,  may  entail  lifelong  misery,  which  the 
maternal  or  friendly  guardian  has  done  all  in 
her  power  to  prevent.  I  myself  once  knew  a 
German  lady  who,  married  and  childless  for 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  I9 

many  years,  confessed  to  me  that  a  ball  attended 
in  her  early  youth  was  the  cause  of  this  mis- 
fortune. 

I  have  known  of  repeated  instances  of  incura- 
ble disease  and  even  of  death  arising  from  rides 
on  horseback  taken  at  the  critical  period.  I 
have  known  fatal  pulmonary  consumption  to 
arise  from  exposure  of  the  feet  in  silk  stockings, 
at  winter  parties.  Every  matron  knows  and 
relates  these  sad  facts  to  the  young  girls  under 
her  charge.  They  are  sometimes  heeded,  of- 
tener  not.  Nothing  in  our  knowledge  of  youth 
would  lead  us  to  consider  them  as  of  rare  occur- 
rence. And  yet  Dr.  Clarke  attributes  most 
failures  of  the  function  and  its  concomitant, 
maternity,  to  the  school  education  received  by 
our  girls. 

The  accusation  then  of  systematic  neglect  of 
the  periodic  function  by  the  educators  of  youth 
among  us  cannot  be  admitted  without  more  evi- 
dence than  Dr.  Clarke  has  thus  far  given  us. 
That  women  in  America  particularly  neglect 
their  health,  that  women  violate  the  laws  of  their 


20  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

constitution  as  men  cannot  violate  theirs,  and 
that  the  love  of  intellectual  pursuits  causes  them 
to  do  so,  —  this  is  the  fable  out  of  which  Dr. 
Clarke  draws  the  moral  that  women  must  not  go 
to  college  with  men.  Fable  and  moral  appear 
equally  unsubstantial.  If  Dr.  Clarke  had  said  that 
the  best  men  and  women  of  the  State,  the  wisest 
and  noblest,  should  never  allow  this  subject  of 
education  to  pass  out  of  their  minds  or  out  of 
their  care  ;  if  he  had  said  that,  after  worthily 
receiving  education,  the  first  duty  of  man  and 
woman  is  to  secure  it  to  the  succeeding  genera- 
tion, he  would  have  pointed  to  the  true  remedy 
for  all  that  is  amiss  on  this  head.  The  great 
increase  in  the  study  of  physiology  among  us, 
and  especially  among  women,  must  tend,  we  are 
sure,  to  a  wiser  and  better  self-culture  and  care 
of  the  young.  Education  is  necessarily  "line 
upon  line  and  precept  upon  precept"  The  elder 
generation  can  only  do  its  best,  and  trust  to  the 
docility  and  good  faith  of  the  young. 

The   special  character  of  Dr.   Clarke's   book 
provokes  the  question  whether  he  has  not  un- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  21 

duly  specialized  facts  which  are  general,  and  not 
limited  to  any  coincidence  with  that  which  he 
especially  attacks,  —  the  education  of  American 
women,  and  their  physique  as  affected  by  it. 
Is  it  wholly  or  principally  in  America  that  young 
women  fail  of  sexual  development,  have  imper- 
fect busts,  are  afflicted  with  ill-health  and  in- 
sanity, and  in  marriage  are  sterile,  or  if  they 
have  children  cannot  nurse  them  ? 

A  well-known  sentence  of  Solomon's  shows 
that  even  in  his  time  the  female  form  sometimes 
failed  of  completeness.  Rousseau  says  of  one 
of  the  women  whom  he  admired,  "  et  de  la  gorge 
comme  de  ma  main!'  with  a  general  slur  upon 
all  women  so  formed.  In  Paris  has  been  in- 
vented and  advertised  an  artificial  bosom  war- 
ranted  to  palpitate  for  a  whole  evening.  It  is 
not  likely  that  this  invention  has  been  patented 
for  the  exclusive  use  of  American  women. 

To  return  to  Biblical  times,  one  of  the  persons 
healed  by  our  Saviour  was  a  woman  suffering 
from  what  Dr.  Clarke  would  call  menorrhcea.  It 
may  be  as  well  to  remark  by  the  way  that 


22  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

during  the  twelve  years  of  her  suffering  she  had 
spent  all  that  she  had  upon  physicians,  and  still 
was  nothing  the  better,  but  rather  the  worse. 
Sterility  was  common  in  the  times  both  of  the 
Old  and  of  the  New  Testament.  It  is  common 
to-day  among  the  savages  of  Africa.  It  is  by 
no  means  true  that  the  women  who  themselves 
show  the  greatest  physical  development  are 
always  those  whose  offspring  are  the  most 
numerous  and  healthy.  Slender  women  are 
often  more  successful  mothers  and  nurses  than 
the  stout  sisters  whose  full  outlines  attest  their 
\  own  robusticity.  Even  as  to  the  facts  of  nurs- 
ing, women  with  small  breasts  often  have  an 
abundant  supply  of  milk ;  while  women  with 
fuller  outward  development  often  have  little  or 
none. 

Andrew  Combe  in  his  book  on  Infancy  speaks 
of  the  great  number  of  infants  who  in  Germany 
are  brought  up  by  hand.  He  gives  most  careful 
rules  for  rearing  infants  on  artificial  food,  and 

does    not    treat   this   as   at   all   an   uncommon 

* 

necessity.      English  women   confined  in   Italy 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  2$ 

and  other  foreign  countries  proverbially  lose 
their  milk,  and  the  profession  of  wet-nurse  to 
an  English  family  has  long  been  one  of  the 
most  common  in  Rome  and  Naples.  Many 
German  women  in  America  are  obliged  to  feed 
their  infants  wholly  or  in  part,  and  many 
American  women  are  good  nurses  and  prolific 
mothers. 

Again  we  see  in  Paris  papers  advertisements 
of  the  new  remedies,  "  which  the  patient  herself 
can  apply,  and  which  will  spare  her  the  un- 
pleasant necessity  of  examinations,"  &c.  Phy- 
sicians of  large  practice  and  experience  are 
able,  in  all  parts  of  the  world,  to  chronicle  many 
cases  of  uterine  disease,  of  functional  derange- 
ment, and  of  arrested  development  among 
women,  in  which  cases  no  plea  of  excessive 
cerebral  action  induced  by  over-study  is  at  all 
admissible.  But  Dr.  Clarke  sees  disease  chiefly 
in  American  women.  In  them  reside  leucor- 
rhoea,  dysmenorrhoea,  amenorrhoea,  &c.  In  them 
are  ateknia,  agalactia,  amazia.  And  the  reason 
why  they  have  all  these  evils  is  simply  this, 


24  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

some  of  them  wish  to  enter  Harvard  College, 
and  some  of  them  have  already  passed  through 
other  colleges. 

Now  that  the  topics  of  sex  and  education 
need  careful  study  and  remodelling  of  ideas 
and  methods,  nobody  is  less  disposed  to  deny 
than  the  writer  of  these  lines.  She  is  perfectly 
sure  that  the  philosophy  of  sex  is  thus  far 
little  understood  in  America,  or  anywhere 
else.  She  has  the  same  impression  concerning 
the  philosophy  of  education.  The  physical  evils 
attendant  upon  the  female  constitution  are  as 
old  as  that  constitution  itself.  They  deserve 
and  require  the  most  careful  investigation.  But 
the  feminine  hygiene  will  be  higher  and  more 
complete  when  it  is  administered  by  women. 
Personal  experience  adds  an  important  element 
even  to  the  closest  and  most  scientific  obser- 
vation. 

Before  this  pet  theory  of  the  incompatibility 
of  health  with  intellectual  activity,  for  women 
only,  was  discovered,  men  of  science  speculated 
concerning  the  deficient  busts  of  American 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  2$ 

women.  The  dry,  stimulating  climate  was  sup- 
posed, in  a  great  measure,  to  account  for  it. 
The  fact  itself  reaches  back  to  the  grandmothers 
of  the  grandmothers  of  to-day/.  *  It  was  and  is 
chiefly  observable  in  the  northern  and  eastern 
States.  As  you  go  south,  you  find  fuller  forms, 
but  not  always  combined  with  emptier  heads. 
The  effect  of  the  climate  of  this  portion  of  the 
country  upon  the  masculine  physique  is  equally 
noticeable,  and  has  long  been  a  subject  of  re- 
mark. Men  here  are  for  the  most  part  wiry, 
sinewy,  nervous,  and  brainy.  If  any  of  us,  car- 
rying out  Dr.  Clarke's  views,  prefer  to  mate 
with  men  in  whom  flesh  and  muscle  counter- 
poise the  tyrannous  nerve  system,  we  too  must 
go  over  the  borders,  and  bring  the  progenitors 
of  the  future  race  from  lands  where  the  east 
wind  blows  not.  But  this  reminds  us  of  the 
well-known  overplus  of  sixty  thousand  single 
women  in  Massachusetts  alone.  Dr.  Clarke 
arraigns  the  mothers,  actual  and  possible,  for 
being  no  better  than  they  are.  But  what  is  he 
going  to  do  about  the  impossible  fathers,  in  view 


26  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

of  the  coming  generation  to  which  he  is  so  de- 
voted ? 

If  one  thing  could  be  more  astonishing  than 
another  in  Dr.  Clarke's  treatment  of  his  subject, 
we  should  give  the  palm  to  his  consideration 
of  the  influence  of  climate  on  the  human  organ- 
ism. He  is  unwilling  to  consider  it  at  all  as 
a  factor  in  the  alleged  ill-health  of  American 
women.  According  to  him  one  hundred  years 
are  not  enough  to  mould  the  European  organ- 
ism in  accordance  with  the  American  type. 
If  this  is  really  his  opinion,  his  experience  must 
have  differed  widely  from  that  of  others.  I 
have  observed  important  effects  of  modification 
produced  by  climate,  in  shorter  periods  of  time 
than  this.  Two  brothers  of  one  family,  resident 
in  Boston,  separated  at  the  conclusion  of  the 
Revolutionary  War.  One  remained  in  this  city, 
one  migrated  to  Nova  Scotia.  Those  who  at 
a  later  day  were  able  to  compare  the  children 
of  these  two  gentlemen  found  the  Boston  family 
marked  with  every  characteristic  of  the  New 
England  race,  thin,  nervous,  wiry,  alert,  intense. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  2J 

The  Nova  Scotian  family  were  stout,  full- 
blooded,  and  plethoric,  altogether  of  the  Eng- 
lis^i  colonial  type. 

English  families  resident  in  India  soon  lose 
the  freshness  of  their  coloring  and  the  fulnesa 
of  their  outline.  In  fact,  the  adaptation  of  one 
nationality  to  another  is  sometimes  astonishingly 
rapid.  Mr.  Burlingame  looked  almost  like  a 
Chinaman  before  he  died.  The  writer  has  seen 
an  American  official  long  resident  in  Turkey 
whose  physiognomy  had  become  entirely  that  of 
his  adopted  country.  The  potent  American  cli- 
mate works  quickly  in  assimilating  the  foreign 
material  offered  to  it.  Two  generations  suffice 
to  efface  the  salient  marks  of  Celtic,  Saxon, 
French,  or  Italian  descent.  The  Negro  alone  is 
able  to  offer  a  respectable  resistance. 

It  may  occur  to  some  that  the  assumed  iden- 
tity of  the  intellectual  education  given  to  girls 
and  boys  in  America  may  have  less  to  do  with 
the  ill-health  of  the  former  than  the  dissimilarity 
of  their  physical  training.  Boys  are  much  in 
the  open  air.  Girls  are  much  in  the  house.  Boys 


28  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

wear  a  dress  which  follows  and  allows  their 
natural  movements.  Girls  wear  clothes  which 
impede  and  almost  paralyze  their  limbs.  Boys 
have,  moreover,  the  healthful  hope  held  out  to 
them  of  being  able  to  pursue  their  own  objects, 
and  to  choose  and  follow  the  business  or  profes- 
sion of  their  choice.  Girls  have  the  dispiriting 
prospect  of  a  secondary  and  derivative  existence, 
with  only  so  much  room  allowed  them  as  may 
not  cramp  the  full  sweep  of  the  other  sex.  The 
circumstances  first  named  directly  affect  health, 
the  last  exerts  a  strong  reflex  action  upon  it. 
"  We  are  only  women,  and  it  does  not  matter," 
passes  from  mother  to  daughter.  A  very  esti- 
mable young  lady  said  to  me  the  other  day,  in 
answer  to  a  plea  for  dress-reform,  "  It  is  better 
to  look  handsome,  even  if  it  does  shorten  life  a 
little."  Her  care  of  herself  probably  does  not 
go  beyond  that  indicated  by  this  saying.  Dr. 
Clarke  cites  a  few  instances  of  functional  de- 
rangement. But  by  far  the  most  frequent  dif- 
ficulty with  our  women  arises  from  uterine 
displacement,  and  this  in  turn  comes  partly 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TIOX.  29 

from  the  utter  disuse  of  the  muscles  which 
should  keep  the  uterus  in  place,  but  which  are 
kept  inactive  by  the  corset,  weighed  upon  by  the 
heavy  skirt,  and  drawn  upon  by  the  violent  and 
unnatural  motion  of  the  dancing  at  present  in 
vogue.  Is  it  any  wonder  that  these  ill-educated, 
over-burthened  muscles  give  way,  like  other  ill- 
trained,  over-powered  things  ?  Some  instances 
of  remarkable  robustness  in  women  have  been( 
the  result  of  a  physical  education  identical  with 
that  usually  given  to  boys.  In  these  cases,  the 
parents,  after  repeated  losses  of  children  through 
much  cherishing,  have  at  last  determined  to  give 
the  girls  a  chance  through  athletic  sports  and 
unrestricted  exercise  in  the  open  air.  And  this 
has  again  and  again  proved  successful. 

Much  in  Dr.  Clarke's  treatment  of  his  subject 
is  objectionable.  We  are  left  in  doubt  whether 
his  book  was  written  for  men  or  for  women,  and 
we  conclude  that  his  method  of  statement  is  not 
good  for  either.  Much  of  his  remarking  upon 
sex  is  justly  offensive,  and  his  statements  con- 
cerning those  single  women  of  culture  whom 


30  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

he  terms  agenes  would  scarcely  be  endured  in 
any  household  in  which  these  single  saints  bear 
the  burthens  of  all  the  others,  and  lead  lives 
divinely  wedded  to  duty.  The  odious  expres- 
sion which  completes  his  picture  of  "  the  girls 
tied  to  their  dictionaries,"  &c.,  would  exclude  the 
book,  and  the  writer  too,  from  some  pure  and 
polite  circles.  And  we  must  say  to  him,  with  all 
due  regard  for  the  good  intentions  with  which 
we  desire  to  credit  him, — 

"  These  things  must  not  be  thought  of  on  this 
wise." 

I  have  thus  attempted  a  brief  addition  to  the 
comments  of  women  upon  Dr.  Clarke's  work, 
telling  pretty  plainly  what  I  think  of  it,  and  why. 
But  a  full  discussion  of  these  great  themes  of 
Sex  and  Education  can  hardly  be  had  in  answer 
to  a  summons  so  sharp  and  so  partial  as  his  own. 
Not  to  dogmatize  and  counter-dogmatize  upon 
these  points  will  make  either  men  or  women 
wiser.  Not  for  those  who  think  they  know  every 
thing  about  the  matter  to  discourse  to  those 
whom  they  judge  as  knowing  nothing  about  it. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  31 

These  processes  will  always  retard  instead  of 
advancing  the  discovery  of  truth.  But  when 
men  and  women  may  meet  together  for  fair  and 
equal  interchange  of  thought,  the  men  not  want- 
ing in  modesty,  nor  the  women  in  courage,  then 
we  shall  be  glad  to  listen,  if  we  do  not  speak. 
And  if  we  do  speak,  we  shall  say,  "  Father,  thou 
hast  made  all  things  well,  and  without  thy  wis- 
dom was  not  any  thing  made  that  was  made." 


32  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


II. 

BY  THOS.   WENTWORTH    HIGGINSON. 

THOSE  who  are  anxiously  studying  the  prob- 
lem of  the  Education  of  Women  may  be  trusted 
to  read  with  eager  interest  this  little  book  by 
Dr.  Clarke.  The  author  takes  pains  to  recognize 
the  intellectual  ability  of  women  ;  and  he  puts 
on  record  a  most  valuable  and  emphatic  denial, 
from  his  own  professional  experience,  of  the 
common  assertion  that  American  women  habitu- 
ally desire  to  escape  the  duties  of  wifehood  and 
motherhood.  I  should  not  call  the  book  gener- 
ally coarse,  but  very  needlessly  rough  and  plain- 
spoken,  especially  for  a  book  destined  to  popular 
perusal  ;  and  the  author  certainly  touches  the 
verge  of  coarseness  in  his  description  of  a  possi- 
ble sexless  woman.  He,  however,  indulges  in 
no  unfair  fling  against  the  advocates  of  the 
equality  of  the  sexes,  except  as  far  as  is  con- 


SEX  AND   EDUCATION.  33 

tained  in  the  following  sentences :  "  Woman 
seems  to  be  looking  up  to  man  and  his  develop- 
ment, as  the  goal  and  ideal  of  womanhood.  The 
new  gospel  of  female  development  glorifies  what 
she  possesses  in  common  with  him,  and  tramples 
under  her  feet  as  a  source  of  weakness  and  badge 
of  inferiority  the  mechanism  and  functions  pe- 
culiar to  herself."  (p.  1 29.)  If  this  is  intended  to 
describe  the  "  gospel  "  proclaimed  by  the  "  Wom- 
an's Journal,"  for  instance,  there  is  not  a  num- 
ber of  the  paper,  from  the  beginning,  which  does 
not  contain  the  material  wherewith  to  refute  the 
statement.  And  that  it  is  not  true  of  the  agita- 
tion in  America,  as  a  whole,  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  this  movement  has  been  constantly  under 
criticism  from  European  and  Roman  Catholic 
sources,  for  precisely  the  opposite  tendency  ; 
that  is,  for  encouraging  the  study  of  physiology 
in  schools,  and  for  thus  making  young  girls  too 
well  acquainted  with  those  special  laws  of  their 
own  being,  about  which  they  were  once  studi- 
ously kept  in  ignorance.  The  two  charges  de- 
stroy each  other:  both  cannot  be  true,  and  I 

2»  C 


34  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

think  that  neither  is.  Certainly^  thejstrongest 
argumentsjnjavor  of  Wo^naji^uffrj^e-are^based 
not  on  the  identity,  but  on  the  difference  of  the 


It  is  claimed  by  admiring  critics,  in  regard 
to  Dr.  Clarke's  book,  that  "  his  method  is  purely 
scientific."  From  this  I  should  be  inclined  to 
dissent.  The  method  does  not  seem  to  me 
purely  scientific,  but  popular  ;  and  not  so  much 
popular  as  'clinical,  —  that  is,  as  if  familiarly  ad- 
dressed by  a  physician  to  a  circle  of  students 
or  patients,  among  whom  the  personal  authority 
or  popularity  of  the  teacher  might  be  relied 
upon  to  fill  some  gaps  in  the  argument.  The 
purely  scientific  method  waives  all  such  per- 
sonal prestige.  Darwin  offers  his  basis  of  facts 
as  modestly  and  as  amply  -  as  if  he  were  an 
unknown  man  ;  and  proceeds  step  by  step,  still 
fortifying  himself,  or  stating  frankly  where  he 
is  unfortified.  I  have  been  a  pretty  careful 
reader  of  books  on  Natural  History  all  my  life  ; 
and  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  contemporary 
science  offers  a  standard,  both  as  to  facts  and 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  35 

inferences,  whose  demands  are  hardly  met  by 
the  book  now  under  discussion. 

Let  us  consider,  first,  Dr.  Clarke's  facts,  and 
then  his  inferences. 

I.     Dr.  Clarke  s  Facts. 

I  certainly  am  conscious  of  no  manner  of  bias 
against  Dr.  Clarke,  who  was  my  townsman  and 
college  classmate ;  and  I  opened  his  pages, 
honestly  hoping  to  find  an  array  of  facts  that 
should  be  impressive  both  by  their  quality  and  by 
their  quantity.  To  show,  by  citing  individual 
instances,  that  the  pressure  of  our  school  sys- 
tem injures  health  very  often,  is  not  enough. 
To  take  seven  cases  out  of  a  physician's  note- 
book, and  then  assure  us  that  there  are  a  good 
many  more,  is  not  enough.  Yet  this  is  pre- 
cisely what  Dr.  Clarke  does  ;  and,  strange  to 
say,  one  of  these  is  the  case  of  an  actress  and 
another  of  a  clerk,  leaving  only  five  educational 
instances  in  all.  This  does  not  seem  to  me 
what  would  be  called,  in  any  other  branch  of 
science,  a  satisfactory  basis  of  facts.  For  in- 


36  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

stance,  I  open  the  last  "  American  Naturalist," 
and  find  Professor  Wilder  thus  criticising  the 
new  work  on  "  The  Cerebral  Convolutions 
of  Man,"  by  Ecker  :  "  The  value  of  such  a  gen- 
eralization might  be  estimated  if  the  author 
had  given  us  the  number  of  individuals  upon 
which  it  is  based."  This  is  precisely  the  criti- 
cism I  should  make  on  the  generalizations  of 
Dr.  Clarke. 

That  our  edur^onal  system  is  faulty  on  the 
physiological  side  is  an  old  story.  The  evil 
has  been  under  discussion,  in  a  general  way, 
for  years,  —  by  Horace  Mann,  Dr.  Howe,  Dr. 
Butler  of  Providence,  and  by  myself,  among 
others,  in  a  paper  called  "  The  Murder  of  the 
Innocents,"  published  in  the  "  Atlantic  Month- 
ly "  for  September,  1859,  and  afterward  included 
in  "  Out  Door  Papers."  It  seems  to  me  that 
what  is  most  needed  is  not  the  mere  reiteration 
of  those  facts,  even  if  more  ably  and  con- 
vincingly stated,  but  rather  to  show  by  careful 
and  discriminating  statistics  to  what  extent 
girls  have  been  injured,  beyond  boys,  by  the 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


37 


system.  Dr.  Clarke  does  not  marshal  his  facts 
in  any  such  way  as  this,  and  in  some  cases 
almost  commits  direct  unfairness  by  the  omis- 
sion, —  as,  for  instance,  where  he  cites  "  Bits 
of  Talk,"  to  show  the  superior  physique  of  the 
Nova  Scotia  children  as  compared  with  those 
of  New  England,  and  forgets  to  state  that  the 
italics  he  introduces  are  his  own,  and  that  the 
author  of  that  book  does  not  emphasize  the 
superiority  in  the  one  sex  more  than  in  the  other. 

It  has  been  pointed  out,  again  and  again,  in 
the  <4  Woman's  Journal "  and  elsewhere,  that 
there  are  whole  classes  of  facts  to  be  had,  bear- 
ing most  closely  on  this  question,  which  neither 
Dr.  Clarke  nor  any  physiologist  opposed  to 
co-education  has  yet  attempted  to  obtain.  In- 
stead of  shrinking  from  these  facts,  we  are 
constantly  begging  for  them.  Until  they  are 
obtained,  systematized,  and  displayed,  the  whole 
argument  of  Dr.  Clarke  has  but  an  insufficient 
basis  of  facts.  They  are  such  as  these :  — 

I.  We  need  facts  as  to  the  comparative  physi- 
ology of  American  women  in  different  localities. 


38  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

There  are  highly  educated  communities  and 
very  uneducated  communities.  Has  Dr.  Clarke, 
or  any  one,  compared  the  health  of  women  in 
cities  and  in  country  towns  ;  in  cities  with 
good  schools  and  cities  with  poor  schools  ;  or 
in  highly  educated  States  like  Massachusetts 
and  Connecticut,  as  compared  with  States  where 
the  climate  is  similar,  but  the  school  system 
less  thorough  ?  The  standard  of  female  educa- 
tion is  not  very  formidably  high  in  Pennsylva- 
nia, where  they  also  have  an  equable  climate, 
no  east  winds,  and  most  comfortable  living ; 
and  yet  one  of  Dr.  Clarke's  severest  statements 
as  to  female  debility  (p.  113)  comes  from  Penn- 
sylvania. In  country  villages  I  could  name, 
where  there  are  only  very  poor  district  schools, 
kept  for  less  than  half  the  year,  the  traveller 
constantly  observes,  among  the  farmers'  daugh- 
ters, cheeks  as  pale  and  vitality  as  deficient  as 
in  the  best  educated  metropolis. 

2.  Again,  we  need  facts  as  to  American-born 
women  of  different  races.  Dr.  Clarke  says  of  a 
century,  "that  length  of  time  could  not  trans- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  39 

form  the  sturdy  German  fraulein  and  robust 
English  damsel  into  the  fragile  American  miss." 
(p.  1 68.)  How  does  he  know  it  could  not  ?  I 
have  seen  this  change  very  nearly  effected,  in  a 
single  generation,  among  the  children  of  Eng- 
lish, Irish,  French  Canadians,  and  even  the  Nova 
Scotians  whom  he  so  praises  ;  and  this  in  fam- 
ilies where  even  reading  and  writing  were  rare 
accomplishments.  As  far  as  I  can  observe,  the 
effect  of  climate,  change  of  diet,  change  of  living, 
on  all  these  classes,  is  almost  sure  to  produce 
the  same  result  of  delicacy,  almost  of  fragility,  in 
the  second  generation,  with  or  without  school- 
ing ;  and  among  the  boys  almost  as  much  as 
among  the  girls.  A  physician  in  a  large  manu- 
facturing town  once  told  me  that  the  unhealth- 
iest  class  of  the  community,  in  his  opinion, 
consisted  of  the  sons  of  Irish  parents. 

3.  We  need  also  the  comparative  physiology 
of  different  social  positions.  As  a  rule,  the 
daughters  of  the  wealthy  in  America,  who  are 
sent  to  private  schools,  or  taught  by  govern- 
esses, are  far  less  severely  taxed,  as  to  their 


40  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

brains,  than  the  daughters  of  the  middle  classes, 
who  go  to  the  public  schools.  Is  Dr.  Clarke  pre- 
pared to  show  that  those  of  the  former  class  are 
decidedly  more  healthy  ?  If  so,  this  is  another 
point  that  would  have  a  direct  bearing  on  his 
argument.  My  own  impression  is  that  he  would 
find  it  hard  to  prove  this.  ' 

4.  But  there  is  still  a  fourth  class  of  facts, 
only  to  be  obtained  by  an  extensive  record  of 
individual  instances.  Letting  go  all  discrimi- 
nations of  locality,  race,  and  social  position,  and 
looking  only  at  individuals  under  similar  con- 
ditions, is  Dr.  Clarke  prepared  to  assert  that, 
as  a  rule,  it  is  the  hardest  students  in  the  school 
who  become  invalids  ?  He  would  say,  on  a 
priori  grounds,  that  it  must  be  so.  But  do 
facts  show  it  ?  Looking  over  families  and 
schools  that  I  have  known,  I  certainly  cannot 
say  that  the  young  girls  who  have  lost  their 
health  were  the  most  studious,  —  quite  as  often 
the  contrary.  I  have  asked  teachers  of  wide 
experience,  "  Have  you  observed  that  your 
best  scholars  have  furnished  the  larger  proper- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  41 

tion  of  invalids  ? "  and  they  have  always  said 
"  No."  Yet  who  that  knows  the  affection  with 
which  teachers  are  apt  to  follow  the  later  career 
of  their  pupils  will  deny  that  this  evidence 
has  much  value.  Here  is  a  fourth  class  of  facts 
which  have  a  direct  bearing  upon  the  subject, 
and  the  ignoring  of  which  weakens  the  value 
of  our  author's  statements. 

5.  I  am  struck  with  the  farther  point,  that 
Dr.  Clarke  seems  to  have  entered  on  his  inquiry 
in  the  spirit  of  an  advocate,  not  of  a  judge,  and 
to  have  taken  absolutely  no  account  of  the 
physiological  benefits  of  education  for  WODICH. 
There  certainly  are  many  instances  —  all  teach- 
ers have  known  them  —  of  great  benefit  to 
health,  in  case  of  girls,  under  the  stimulus  given 
by  study.  Either  Dr.  Clarke  knows  such  in- 
stances, or  he  does  not.  If  he  knows  them,  he 
is  bound  to  state  them  in  such  an  argument  ; 
and,  if  possible,  to  arrange  and  tabulate  them, 
in  order  to  set  them  against  the  instances  on 
the  other  side.  If  he  does  not  know  them,  it 
simply  shows  that,  while  the  facts  of  disease 


42  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

impress  the  physician,  the  facts  of  health  may 
elude  him.  This  beneficial  influence  has  been 
well  analyzed  by  a  woman  of  great  sense  and 
judgment,  herself  a  college  graduate,  Miss 
Mary  E.  Beedy,  now  residing  in  London.  I 
have  lately  had  the  pleasure  of  reading  an 
essay  of  hers,  about  to  appear  in  "  Scribner's 
Monthly,"  on  "The  Health  of  English  and 
American  Women."  In  this  she  incidentally 
gives  reasons  why  the  health  of  studious  girls 
is  often  better  than  that  of  any  others,  — 
because  their  minds  are  happily  occupied, — 
because  they  are  thus  kept  from  social  excesses, 
far  more  prejudicial  than  study,  —  because  their 
mental  training  improves  their  judgment  and 
self-control,  —  and  because  they  are  less  reckless 
about  their  health  in  proportion  as  they  have 
an  object  to  gain.  I  quote  these  points  from 
memory.  Coming  from  a  graduate  of  Antioch 
College,  they  are  surely  entitled  to  considera- 
tion ;  and  yet  all  the  thought  and  observation 
of  Dr.  Clarke  had  not  suggested  one  of  these 
points  to  his  mind.  If  he  had  thought  of  them, 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  43 

he  would  surely  have  mentioned  them  ;  for 
they  were  essential  to  the  justice  of  his  state- 
ment. 

It  seems  to  me  fair  to  point  out,  also,  the 
insufficient  way  in  which  Dr.  Clarke  presents 
his  authorities,  when  he  goes  outside  of  his  own 
observations.  The  single  statement  which  I 
have  seen  cited  from  his  book,  by  the  news- 
papers, twice  as  often  as  all  others  put  together, 
is  his  citation  of  the  opinion  of  "  a  philanthro- 
pist and  an  intelligent  observer,"  that  *'  the  co- 
education of  the  sexes  is  intellectually  a  success, 
physically  a  failure."  Yet  Dr.  Clarke  does  not 
give  the  name  of  this  informant,  nor  any  thing 
but  the  vaguest  hint  as  to  the  extent  or  value 
of  his  observations.  The  gentleman  to  whom 
the  remark  has  been,  I  find,  popularly  attributed, 
Rev.  C.  H.  Brigham,  of  Ann  Arbor,  Michigan, 
expressly  disclaims  it  in  a  private  letter  to  me, 
and  he  has  recently  published  a  statement  looking 
quite  the  other  way.  Dr.  Clarke  also  states  that 
"  another  gentleman,  more  closely  connected  with 
a  similar  institution  of  education  than  the  per- 


44  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

son  just  referred  to,  has  arrived  at  a  similar 
conclusion."  (p.  144.)  I  must  say,  with  due 
deference  to  Dr.  Clarke,  that  this  does  not 
seem  to  me  a  scientific  way  of  adducing  evi- 
dence. During  the  hurry  and  excitement  of 
the  first  days  of  our  civil  war,  it  was  considered 
worth  while  to  telegraph  all  over  the  country 
the  opinions  of  "  a  reliable  gentleman  "  or  the 
statements  of  "  an  intelligent  contraband  ; "  but 
we  do  not  find  such  authorities  gravely  cited  in 
the  official  reports  of  the  "  Surgical  Results  of 
the  War." 

It  seems  to  me,  therefore,  that  Dr.  Clarke 
by  no  means  comes  up  to  the  recognized  stand- 
ard of  science  either  in  the  quantity  or  the 
quality  of  the  facts  on  which  he  bases  his  argu- 
ment. But,  granting  his  premises  sufficient,  is 
his  conclusion  just? 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  4$ 

II.     Dr.  Clarke  s  Inferences. 

In  a  first  article  on  Dr.  E.  H.  Clarke's  work 
*'  Sex  in  Education,"  some  criticisms  were  made 
on  his  statements  of  fact ;  and  it  was  pointed 
out  that  all  the  cases  actually  cited  by  him,  of 
special  injury  to  the  health  of  women  through 
school  education,  amounted  to  precisely  five. 
Since  writing  that  article  I  have  visited  Vassar 
College,  where  I  found  a  good  deal  of  dissatis- 
faction to  exist  among  the  authorities,  over  one 
of  those  five  cases,  as  stated  by  Dr.  Clarke.  He 
mentions  a  certain  Miss  D.  who  entered  Vassar 
College  at  fourteen.  The  President  and  the 
Resident  Physician  assured  me  that  no  pupil 
had  ever  entered  that  institution  at  that  age. 
Dr.  Clarke  says  of  this  young  lady  that  "  she 
studied,  recited,  stood  at  the  blackboard,  walked, 
and  went  through  her  gymnastic  exercises,  from 
the  beginning  to  the  end  of  the  term,  just  as 
boys  do."  The  same  authorities  told  me  that 
this  statement,  taken  as  a  whole,  was  an  abso- 
lute untruth  ;  the  gymnastic  exercises  being 


46  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

absolutely  forbidden  to  the  students  at  certain 
periods,  and  the  greatest  care  being  enjoined 
upon  them  in  all  respects.  The  President  and 
the  Resident  Physician  also  expressed  some 
surprise  that,  in  a  case  of  such  importance,  their 
testimony  should  not  have  been  at  least  called 
for,  instead  of  relying  solely  on  that  of  the 
patient.  I  believe  that  it  is  customary  among 
physicians  to  show  some  consideration  or  cour- 
tesy to  each  other  in  such  matters,  before  putting 
cases  in  print  which  seem  to  reflect  on  the  pro- 
fessional fidelity  of  any  one.  Be  this  as  it  may, 
this  denial  of  fundamental  facts  leaves  this  in- 
stance at  least  open  to  suspicion  ;  and  reduces 
Dr.  Clarke's  yet  undisputed  cases  of  injury  to 
the  health  of  girls,  through  schooling,  to  four. 
But  suppose  the  instances  were  four  thou- 
sand. Grant  all  his  premises.  What  is  his 
conclusion  ?  All  that  he  demands  of  an  educa- 
tional establishment  for  girls  is  that  "the 
organization  of  studies  and  instruction  must 
be  flexible  enough  to  admit  of  the  periodical 
and  temporary  absence  of  each  pupil,  without 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  47 

loss  of  rank,  or  necessity  of  making  up  work, 
from  recitation  and  exercise  of  all  sorts." 
(p.  158.)  And  yet  he  goes  on  to  declare  that 
for  Harvard  College,  for  instance,  to  adapt  itself 
for  the  introduction  of  young  women,  would  be 
a  thing  so  enormously  difficult  that  it  would 
cost  two  millions  of  dollars!  (p.  151.) 

This  is  what  is  so  inexplicable  to  me  in  the 
conclusions  of  the  book.  Grant  all  Dr.  Clarke's 
facts,  and  all  his  demands,  —  what  follows  ?  Of 
course,  in  that  case,  those  grammar  schools  and 
high  schools  to  which  girls  are  admitted  must 
be  essentially  remodelled.  These  I  waive.  But, 
so  far  as  our  leading  colleges  are  concerned,  — 
and  Harvard  in  particular,  —  I  not  only  do  not 
see  why  the  remodelling  for  the  admission  of 
women  should  cost  two  millions,  but  I  do  not 
see  why  it  should  cost  a  cent.  I  do  not  see, 
indeed,  why  there  is  needed  at  Harvard  any 
remodelling  at  all  :  only  a  quiet  carrying  out 
of  what  is  already  the  marked  tendency  in  that 
institution,  —  to  substitute  elective  for  required 
studies,  voluntary  attendance  on  exercises  for 


48  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

required  attendance,  and  examinations  as  tests 
of  scholarship  in  place  of  daily  marks.  Surely 
it  cannot  have  escaped  Dr.  Clarke's  notice  that 
if  he  were  having  Harvard  College  arranged 
on  purpose  to  suit  girls,  according  to  his  formula 
just  quoted,  it  could  hardly  be  done  by  a  more 
effectual  process  than  is  actually  going  on  at 
this  moment,  without  any  reference  to  women 
at  all.  If  this  be  so,  why  not  extend  this  new 
system  to  women  and  let  them  have  the  benefit 
of  it  ? 

When  Dr.  Clarke  and  I  were  in  Harvard 
College,  every  absence  from  daily  prayers  or 
recitation  counted  as  an  offence.  Now  each 
student  is  allowed  sixty  absences  from  prayers, 
—  almost  one-fourth  of  the  whole  number,  —  and 
no  questions  are  asked  until  that  number  is 
exceeded.  Then  almost  all  rank  turned  on 
marks  given  at  the  daily  recitation.  Now  there 
are  departments  in  which  no  daily  marks  are 
given,  and  the  question  of  scholarship  is  deter- 
mined by  occasional  examinations.  To  these,  it 
would  seem,  Dr.  Clarke  does  not  object,  for  he 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  49 

says  (p.  1 34)  "  it  is  easy  to  frame  a  theoretical 
emulation,  in  which  results  only  are  compared  and 
tested,  that  would  be  healthy  and  invigorating." 
Yet  such  emulation  as  this  is  all  that  seems 
likely  to  be  left  at  Harvard  in  the  way  of  dan- 
gerous rivalry,  when  the  present  system  shall 
have  been  fully  developed.  "  The  steady,  un- 
tiring, day-by-day  competition  "  that  Dr.  Clarke 
deprecates  is  being  utterly  laid  aside  ;  and  a 
more  flexible  system  is  being  introduced  for 
young  men,  which  turns  out  to  have  also  the 
incidental  advantage  of  being  precisely  what 
young  women  need.1 

It  is  a  valuable  discovery  that,  the  more  you 
transform  a  college  into  a  University,  the  better 
it  is  adapted  for  both  sexes.  The  same  advan- 
tage may  be  noted  on  another  point,  the  con- 

1  An  additional  illustration  of  this  is  in  the  resolution  in- 
troduced at  the  meeting  of  Harvard  Overseers,  Dec.  30,  1873, 
and  since  adopted  :  — 

"  Resolved,  That  the  Board  of  Overseers  consents  that  for 
the  academic  year  1874-5  all  rules  imposing  penalties  or  marks 
of  censure  upon  Seniors  for  absences  from  church,  and  from 
recitations,  lectures,  or  exercises  other  than  examinations,  be 
suspended." 

3  D 


50  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

sideration  of  which  may  throw  light  on  Dr. 
Clarke's  demand  for  two  million  dollars.  I 
mean  the  question  of  dormitories.  *  If  the  ad- 
mission of  girls  to  our  colleges  does  nothing 
else  but  to  break  down  the  present  system  of 
brick  barracks,  and  to  substitute  the  simpler 
boarding-house  system  of  Michigan  University, 
it  will  be  a  work  well  done.  Of  course,  if  there 
must  be  duplicated  for  girls  the  vast  array  of 
dormitories  now  encumbering  the  scanty  college- 
yard  at  Cambridge,  it  will  cost  a  great  deal  of 
money.  But  just  now,  when  all  the  boarding- 
house  keepers  of  Cambridge  are  deploring  their 
occupation  gone  by  reason  of  these  structures, 
it  is  the  very  time  to  introduce  young  women  into 
the  humbler  quarters  left  vacant  ;  and  why,  in 
this  case,  will  these  students  cost  the  college 
more  than  so  many  additional  young  men  ?  Once 
adopt  the  plan,  which  I  believe  to  be  the  true 
one,  that  it  is  simply  the  office  of  the  college  to 
provide  facilities  of  instruction,  and  that  of  the 
pupils  and  their  parents  (under  the  general  super- 
vision of  the  college)  to  look  out  for  food  and 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  51 

lodging,  medical  attendance  and  spiritual  guid- 
ance,—  and  the  increased  expense  of  joint  col- 
legiate education  turns  out  a  mere  chimera. 
Were  it  ever  so  great,  I  should  still  regard  it  as 
the  best  way  of  spending  money,  since,  in  any 
case,  the  expense  of  providing  for  girls  equal 
advantages  in  a  separate  college  would  be  still 
greater  ;  but  I  do  not  see  it  to  be  great,  or 
indeed  to  amount  to  any  thing  worth  mentioning 
at  all.  Nor  do  I  see  why,  even  if  we  admit  all 
Dr.  Clarke's  facts,  he  has  given  a  single  valid 
reason  why  our  colleges  should  not  admit  girls 
to-morrow,  —  making,  as  many  of  them  have 
already  made  on  other  grounds,  the  necessary 
changes  to  secure  sufficient  flexibility  of  system. 
It  therefore  seems  to  me  that,  as  his  facts  are 
not  worked  out  with  sufficient  thoroughness  to 
justify  any  general  conclusion  whatever,  so  his 
conclusion  that  our  present  colleges,  and  par- 
ticularly Harvard  College,  cannot,  except  at  a 
vast  expense,  admit  women,  is  utterly  unsus- 
tained  by  his  facts. 


52  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


III. 

BY   MRS.    HORACE   MANN. 

DR.  CLARKE'S  "  Sex  in  Education "  would  have 
been  an  invaluable  addition  to  popular  works 
on  hygiene,  if  it  had  been  written  in  a  different 
spirit,  —  without  insult  to  woman,  whom  the 
author  professes  to  respect,  and  whom  he  pro- 
nounces to  be  capable  of  as  extended  education 
as  men  are.  This  admission  on  his  part  is 
actually  overlooked  by  many  of  his  reviewers, 
because  their  feelings  are  so  hurt  by  his  un- 
gentlemanly  jeers,  and-  his  vulgar  attack  upon 
the  noble  army  of  unmarried  women,  who  are 
often  in  the  respectable  ranks  of  "  spinster- 
ism,"  as  he  calls  it,  out  of  self-respect,  and  be- 
cause their  ideal  of  the  marriage  state  is  far 
beyond  that  of  the  average  woman. 

The  average  woman  has  unfortunately  been 
educated  to  consider   matrimony  more  respect- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  53 

able  than  the  state  of  single  blessedness,  which 
has  thus  been  well  named  when  compared  with 
the  heartless  or  heart-breaking  condition  of  in- 
compatible or  unworthy  marriage.  Probably  not 
one  of  these  women  would  have  refused  marriage 
if  the  conditions  she  required  had  been  fulfilled, 
but  without  these  her  self-respect  would  have 
been  compromised.  Probably  the  sentiment  of 
love  has  been  awakened  in  the  breasts  of  all.  It 
would  be  unnatural,  I  concede,  if  it  were  not  so. 

"  God  gives  us  love, 
Something  to  love  he  lends  us  ; " 

but  it  is  far  better  for  the  soul  to  live  in  an  ideal 
union  with  a  possible  twin-soul  than  to  enter 
marriage  upon  a  low  plane  of  thought  or  feeling. 
When  this  most  vital  institution  of  society  is 
demoralized  by  worldliness,  cupidity,  or  other  of 
the  manifold  forms  of  selfishness,  the  greatest 
unhappiness  is  sure  to  follow  ;  on  the  principle 
that  the  corruption  of  the  best  is  the  worst.  It 
is  in  this  fatal  disappointment  of  life  that  we 
see  the  undeveloped  women  ;  and  many  a  young 


54  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

woman,  who  has  an  opportunity  to  make  the 
observation,  is  made  cautious  of  trusting  her 
happiness  to  what  appears  to  be,  and  has  justly 
been  called,  "  the  lottery  of  life."  It  seems  in- 
credible that  a  man  who  has  had  Dr.  Clarke's 
opportunity  of  seeing  domestic  life  has  not  real- 
ized that  unfortunate  marriages  are  the  circum- 
stances under  which  the  harmonious  development 
of  nature  is  arrested  and  perverted.  Such  cir- 
cumstances stunt  growth  and  spoil  family  life, 
and  the  children  who  are  its  unhappy  result. 
Indeed,  the  idea  with  which  many  women  enter 
into  the  married  state,  even  when  their  affections 
are  engaged  in  it,  pervert  and  maim  the  develop- 
ment of  the  human  being,  and  often  end  in  a 
loss  of  faith  in  human  nature.  This  idea  is  that 
the  oneness  of  the  union  is  the  oneness  of  the 
man,  and  not  a  new  oneness  born  of  the  union. 
The  assumption  of  the  authority  of  the  average 
husband  extends  even  to  the  opinion  of  the  wife  ; 
so  that  there  is  often  a  concession  to  a  para- 
mount will  where  the  wife  is  the  superior  by 
nature.  It  is  the  freedom  from  this  bondage 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  55 

which  constitutes  the  happiness  of  single  bless- 
edness, and  is  at  the  root  of  the  unhappy  ten- 
dency to  divorce  which  is  characteristic  of  our 
times.  Far  higher  is  the  unmarried  state,  as 
a  condition  for  the  development  of  the  human 
being,  than  this  low  state  of  marriage,  which 
latter  in  its  ideal  form  is  a  condition  of  mutual 
growth.  A  new  code  of  morals  is  needed  in  this 
regard.  It  is  not  a  mere  matter  of  speculation, 
for  in  true  marriage  the  ideal  is  realized.  The 
one  will  is  only  truly  one  when  based  upon  per- 
fect freedom  and  mutual  sacrifice,  —  which  indeed 
is  not  conscious  sacrifice,  but  only  a  loving  con- 
tention for  self-renunciation. 

I  believe  it  is  a  fact  that  the  higher  the  state 
of  civilization  and  refinement,  the  more  unmar- 
ried women  there  are  ;  and  yet  Dr.  Clarke  could 
add  his  voice  to  the  vulgar  hue  and  cry  against 
them.  Such  is  the  prevalence  of  this  hue  and 
cry  that  women  who  are  not  elevated  above  its 
influence  by  early  inculcations  of  noble  princi- 
ples, of  self-respect,  and  of  a  lofty  ideal,  rush  into 
matrimony  because  they  are  ashamed  to  appear 
to  be  unsought. 


56  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

The  maternal  feeling  is  as  intense  and  pure  in 
many  unmarried  women  as  in  their  married  sis- 
ters. Indeed,  if  we  each  take  an  observation  in 
our  own  circle,  we  shall  see  it  far  more  devel- 
oped in  many  of  them  than  in  many  married 
women,  to  whom  children  are  a  burden  and  a 
hinderance,  and  always  considered  and  treated 
as  if  of  secondary  importance  to  their  pleasures, 
and  even  to  their  more  rational  pursuits.  The 
world  cannot  be  divided  in  that  way.  The  ma- 
ternal sentiment  is  planted  in  the  heart  of  every 
sympathetic  and  affectionate  woman,  —  indeed, 
woman  is  abnormal  without  it,  —  and,  if  not  de- 
veloped by  maternity  itself,  this  sentiment  may 
be  so  by  right  education,  and  thus  saved  from 
becoming  a  root  of  bitterness  such  as  opinions 
like  Dr.  Clarke's  are  calculated  to  plant.  How 
many  an  orphan  child  has  found  the  very  essence 
of  motherly  feeling  and  life-long  devotion  in  a 
maiden  aunt !  The  man  is  to  be  pitied  who  has 
not  seen  this  in  his  acquaintance  with  society : 
one  almost  wishes  to  cite  names  to  prove  one's 
words.  Has  Dr.  Clarke  no  touch-stone  within 


SEX  AND  EDUCATIOX.  $7 

himself  to  prove  such  characters,  —  for  he  must 
have  seen  many  of  them  ?  The  maternal  feeling 
is  often  more  judiciously  exercised  where  the 
passion  of  maternity  —  what  some  moralists 
have  called  brute  maternity  —  has  not  been 
roused  into  activity  by  actual  motherhood.  I 
would  farther  explain  this  by  a  reference  to  those 
mothers  in  whom  every  other  sentiment,  even 
that  of  good  wifehood,  is  absorbed  by  the  ma- 
ternal feeling ;  and  where,  if  they  are  undisci- 
plined in  mind,  this  feeling  makes  it  impossible 
for  them  to  see  the  faults  of  their  children,  or 
to  allow  any  one  else  to  note  them,  or  give  them 
any  aid  in  their  correction.  Even  the  father  is 
deprived  of  his  natural  right  to  share  in  the  care, 
and  is  treated  as  their  natural  enemy  if  he  criti- 
cises them.  The  loving  but  unimpassioned  aunt, 
or  co-operating  educator,  whose  maternal  feeling 
has  been  cultivated  by  her  vocation,  can  see  the 
facts  more  clearly  than  such  mothers,  and  can 
often  suggest  the  remedies.  I  think  it  may 
safely  be  asserted  that  the  first  proof  of  im- 
provement in  the  popular  feeling  about  marriage 


58  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

will  be  the  respect  for  those  unmarried  women 
whose  independent  lives  bear  the  noble  fruits  of 
culture,  benevolence,  and  devotion  to  human 
improvement.  Dr.  Clarke  misses  the  truth 
greatly  also  in  asserting  that  the  advocacy  of 
high  education  for  women  emanates  chiefly  from 
unmarried  women.  None  are  more  eloquent  in 
its  cause  than  the  mothers  —  the  good  mothers, 
of  course  —  who  have  felt  the  pain  of  their  own 
deficiencies  of  education  when  they  found  them- 
selves mothers,  and  too  ignorant  to  fulfil  their 
duties  to  their  own  satisfaction.  "  What  can  I 
do  for  my  child  ?  I  do  not  know  any  thing  about 
its  needs,  or  how  to  supply  them  :  my  own  edu- 
cation had  no  system  or  definite  object,  and 
now  I  feel  it  worthless."  Such  complaints  are 
continual,  and  give  one  the  feeling  that  every 
woman  should  serve  her  time,  be  she  sick  or 
be  she  poor,  in  practical  education,  by  actually 
being  brought  into  contact  with  children,  and 
being  taught  how  to  instruct  them.  I  have 
often  ventured  the  remark  that  the  best  edu- 
cated women  I  knew  were  those  who  had  been 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  59 

practically  engaged  in  education.  I  make  it 
more  earnestly  than  ever,  for  education  is  not 
merely  the  knowledge  of  sciences,  languages,  or 
systems  of  philosophy,  but  consists  in  the  use  of 
the  faculties  and  their  application  to  life  thus 
developed  by  these  and  other  studies.  "The 
proper  study  of  mankind  is  man,"  is  an  utter- 
ance that  has  often  been  quoted  to  prove  that 
the  exact  sciences  were  inferior  objects  of  pur- 
suit to  the  study  of  language  and  philosophy ; 
but  man  cannot  be  studied  aright  without  a  sci- 
entific basis,  and  this  is  the  greatest  argument 
for  the  complete  education  of  women,  in  whose 
hands  is  the  moulding  of  the  human  race.  When 
they  do  not  hold  their  normal  place  and  func- 
tion, —  which  they  cannot  do  if  uncultivated,  — 
the  condition  of  such  portions  of  the  human 
race  shows  it  palpably. 

But  I  must  not,  like  many  of  Dr.  Clarke's 
reviewers,  forget  that  he  concedes  woman's  right 
and  her  capacity  for  the  most  extended  edu- 
cation. 

Let  us  now  look  at  facts  in  regard  to  the  dan- 


60  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

ger  of  systematic  and  persistent  study  for  women. 
One  would  think,  judging  by  Dr.  Clarke's  "  dread- 
ful little  book,"  as  some  one  has  called  it,  that 
women  had  generally  been  educated  to  death, 
while  the  deplorable  fact  is  that  she  has  only 
been  half  educated  at  the  best.  When  in  those 
instances,  few  and  far  between,  where  high  cul- 
ture was  desired,  the  time  for  real  study  has 
come,  the  necessity  for  making  up  for  former 
deficiencies  has  sometimes  made  it  too  severe. 
In  half  a  century's  acquaintance  with  the  details 
of  female  education,  I  can  remember  no  instance 
in  which  study  has  proved  injurious  to  those 
who  came  to  it  in  good  health :  excepted  cases 
are  truly  exceptional,  and  not  the  average.  I 
have  also  known  instances  where  young  women 
who  were  invalids  have  made  a  studious  life  their 
recreation,  and  have  gained  health  and  vigor 
meanwhile,  —  all  the  happier  and  better  for  the 
intellectual  life. 

The  best  remedy  for  too  hard  study  at  any 
one  time  of  life  is  a  thorough  and  gradual  men- 
tal training  from  childhood  up.  The  earliest 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  6 1 

education  of  both  boys  and  girls  is,  generally 
speaking,  aimless  and  indefinite.  A  certain 
amount  of  reading,  writing,  arithmetic,  and  geog- 
raphy are  considered  necessary,  but  instruction 
in  these  is  not  in  itself  cultivation*  of  mind.  It 
may  be  perfectly  arbitrary  and  wooden,  done 
without  any  reference  to  or  attempt  to  develop 
the  nature.  Even  reading  and  writing  need  not 
be  taught  so  mechanically  as  is  done  in  the 
scfiools.  Very  little  attention  is  given  usually  in 
American  schools  to  the  subject-matter  of  the 
reading :  each  child  is  called  upon  to  read  a  sen- 
tence or  a  paragraph,  in  a  reader,  instead  of 
having  a  work  of  genius  put  into  its  hands,  which 
is  to  be  read  in  company,  and  which  is  interest- 
ing enough  in  itself  to  chain  the  attention  and 
to  bring  out  the  natural  elocution  by  making  the 
rest  listen  while  one  reads.*  Geography  is  usu- 
ally taught  by  map  and  outline,  with  little  or  no 

*  In  making  this  criticism,  and  other  possible  ones,  upon 
the  schools,  I  ought  not  to  forget  that  one  teacher  is  expected 
to  minister  to  the  mental  wants  of  fifty,  and  sometimes  even  of 
a  hundred  scholars, — a  relic  of  barbarism  which  it  is  hoped 
that  time  will  ameliorate. 


62  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

descriptive  or  picturesque  explanation  of  scenery, 
fauna,  or  remarkable  natural  features  ;  and  arith- 
metic in  as  uninteresting  a  way,  instead  of  being 
made  living  by  being  connected  with  geometri- 
cal science.  Children's  industrial  faculties  are 
not  set  at  work,  and  the  whole  routine  becomes 
tedious,  is  disconnected  with  life,  and  is  shirked 
as  much  as  possible.  Very  little  training  in  the 
native  language  is  given,  and  even  in  the  most 
advanced  public  schools  little  attention  is  paid 
to  the  art  of  writing  down  thoughts  and  impres- 
sions,—  an  exercise  which  can  with  advantage 
be  begun  in  childhood.  Boys  and  girls  begin  to 
study  Latin  thus  without  an  interesting  idea 
about  human  speech. 

Boys  are  at  last  set  to  work  systematically 
to  prepare  for  their  higher  education,  and  every 
aid  is  given  them  to  make  up  for  lost  time. 
Girls  sometimes  share  this  training  for  a  little 
while  in  some  places  ;  but,  as  it  leads  to  nothing 
in  particular,  it  soon  loses  its  interest,  unless 
perchance  they  are  preparing  to  be  teachers. 
Girls  rarely  go  far  in  mathematical  studies, 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  63 

which  are  the  basis  of  all  scientific  education  ; 
and,  if  they  study  what  are  called  the  higher 
branches  in  schools,  without  this  thorough 
mathematical  training  that  boys  have,  it  is  very 
superficial  study,  and  soon  forgotten.  In  the 
exceptional  cases,  consisting  of  those  whose 
strong  native  talent  and  favoring  circumstances 
urge  on  to  hard  study,  the  necessity  of  making 
up  for  lost  time  may  injure  the  weak,  and  even 
break  down  the  strong,  as  is  often  the  case 
with  men.  I  do  not  believe  the  overstraining 
of  the  brain  is  any  more  injurious  to  young 
women  than  to  young  men,  and  it  is  not  a  thou- 
sandth part  so  common.  The  evil  effects  that 
appear  at  that  time  of  life  in  both  sexes  are 
due  to  other  causes  than  those  Dr.  Clarke  points 
out  so  exclusively.  He  says  there  are  other 
causes,  but  he  passes  them  over  lightly.  One 
of  his  reviewers  has  pointed  them  out  ably 
and  in  detail.  As  far  as  they  refer  to  study, 
the  system  of  cramming  and  emulation,  in  both 
public  and  private  schools,  should  bear  the 
brunt  of  his  accusations.  It  would  undoubtedly 


64  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

be  far  better  for  girls  (or  for  boys)  between 
the  ages  of  fourteen  and  nineteen  to  be  with- 
drawn from  these,  and  study  more  calmly  and 
gradually  without  the  stimulus  of  emulation, 
and  to  defer  the  completion  of  their  education 
in  colleges  till  that  tender  age  is  past. 

I  do  not  share  in  the  fears  expressed  by  Presi- 
dent Eliot,  of  a  demoralizing  influence  from 
the  co-education  of  the  sexes.  Experience  has 
amply  proved  that  such  fears  are  groundless. 
Young  men  and  women  have  long  been  edu- 
cated together  in  country  high  schools,  in  acade- 
mies and  normal  schools,  and  of  late  in  colleges  ; 
and  the  result  has  been  satisfactory,  —  a  healthy 
stimulus,  a  great  enjoyment,  and  productive  of 
mutual  self-respect.  But  I  agree  with  him 
that  Harvard  College  is  not  the  place  to  try  it 
in  at  present,  for  several  reasons,  —  the  tradi- 
tional prejudice,  the  want  of  proper  arrange- 
ments, the  very  low  moral  character  of  the 
college  community ;  but  I  think  the  history  of 
Antioch  College,  where  the  system  was  car- 
ried out  under  great  advantages,  is  a  sufficient 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  65 

testimony  to  the  success  and  good  effects  of 
co-education  as  well  as  to  the  possibility  of  har- 
monious persistent  study  for  women. 

The  only  feature  of  it  that  was  ever  objec- 
tionable in  my  eyes  has  been  the  gathering  of 
young  girls  into  the  preparatory  school,  where 
they  could  enter  at  the  age  of  twelve.  It  is 
unfortunate  enough  to  be  obliged  to  send  young 
boys  away  from  home,  but  it  is  far  more  ob- 
jectionable to  send  young  girls  away.  They 
ought  to  live  at  home  while  getting  their  pre- 
paratory education,  and  all  the  more  if  they 
are  to  follow  it  up  with  college  life.  Domes- 
tic life  is  made  null  to  them  thus.  The  only 
apology  for  having  a  preparatory  school  of  the 
kind  there  was  the  fact  that  so  many  people 
live  scattered  in  the  West  that  schools  are  not 
accessible  to  them,  and  the  preparation  required 
for  a  college  course  could  be  obtained  in  no 
other  way.  My  heart  used  to  ache  for  the 
lovely  little  girls,  separated  from  their  mothers 
at  an  age  when  they  should  have  been  in 
their  arms  every  night,  with  all  those  little 


66  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

confidences  and  confessions  that  mothers  only 
can  elicit.  No  matron  could  supply  the  moth- 
er's place,  even  if  devoted  solely  to  the  office 
of  mothering  the  children  of  a  large  boarding- 
school. 

But  the  case  was  very  different  with  the 
young  women  who  came  to  take  a  course  of  col- 
lege study.  With  an  occasional  exception,  they 
were  of  an  age  and  maturity  of  character  that 
made  them  competent  to  take  care  of  them- 
selves. One  of  the  chief  principles  of  that  col- 
lege discipline  was  the  absence  of  all  emulation 
as  a  motive  power.  There  were  no  honors  to 
be  studied  for,  there  was  not  even  a  rank  list 
to  show  comparative  progress,  there  was  no 
competition  for  pre-eminence  in  college  gradu- 
ation, for  every  student  was  called  upon  to 
prepare  himself  or  herself  to  speak  ;  and  when 
the  graduating  class  was  large  the  speakers 
were  determined  by  lot,  and  not  by  choice.  No 
pupil  necessarily  knew  how  a  fellow  -  pupil 
stood.  If  ill-health  interrupted  study,  time  and 
opportunity  were  given  to  make  up  the  defi- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  67 

ciencies  without  any  publicity;  so  that*  Dr. 
Clarke's  objections  to  co-education  on  that 
score  fall  to  the  ground,  as  far  as  that  college 
is  concerned.  The  mental  and  moral  influences 
of  the  mutual  college  life  were  very  marked  in 
the  superior  moral  deportment  and  refinement 
of  manners  in  the  young  men,  and  the  un- 
excited  and  modest  demeanor  of  the  young 
women,  both  meeting  with  mutual  respect  for 
each  other's  intellectual  and  social  claims.  One 
or  two  instances  of  extravagant  ambition  for 
scholarship,  and  still  more  for  dispatch,  were 
the  only  cases  of  failure  in  health  among  the 
young  women ;  and  these  were  not  sanctioned 
or  promoted  by  any  stimulus  from  the  president 
or  professors.  One  ambitious  teacher  in  the  de- 
partment of  the  preparatory  school,  who  wished 
the  pupils  in  her  classes  to  make  a  greater 
show  than  others,  was  duly  checked  by  inter- 
ference from  the  seats  of  authority.  The  health 
of  both  the  young  men  and  women  improved 
in  a  marked  manner  during  their  college  life. 
Many  came  with  no  knowledge  of  hygiene  or 


68  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

theif  own  physiological  need,  and  special  in- 
struction was  given  in  those  branches  of  knowl- 
edge. The  health  of  the  girls  was  much  better 
than  that  of  the  young  men. 

Young  women  who  came  with  their  systems 
out  of  order,  through  ignorance  and  unhealthy 
living,  were  greatly  benefited,  and  sent  home  to 
spread  the  knowledge  they  had  gained.  But 
one  death  of  each  sex  occurred  in  six  years  (the 
period  of  which  I  write),  and  they  were  both 
cases  of  poisoning  by  food  in  metallic  vessels  ; 
yet  the  hardships  were  great  during  the  first 
years,  and  the  exposures  rather  exceptional, 
owing  to  the  poverty  of  the  food  and  the  in- 
adequacy of  the  buildings  as  to  ventilation  and 
water  supply. 

Regular  occupation  and  mental  activity  are 
as  good  for  women  as  for  men.  Dr.  Clarke 
probably  judges  of  women  by  the  invalids  he 
has  tended  ;  and  his  observations  have  been 
chiefly  limited,  to  all  appearance,  to  the  un- 
healthful  life  and  habits  of  cities.  It  cannot  be 
hard  study  that  has  chiefly  injured  the  young 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  69 

women  he  has  known,  for  I  suspect  few  have 
ever  undertaken  it.  It  has  been  late  hours, 
fashionable  dress,  with  its  necessary  sacrifice  of 
warmth  and  ease,  hot  houses  and  school-rooms, 
and  unnatural  cramming  to  meet  the  demands 
of  unhealthy  emulation. 

The  educators  of  our  private  institutions  for 
girls  will  testify  that  they  have  found  it  diffi- 
cult to  induce  their  pupils  to  a  continuous  and 
thorough  course  of  study.  The  demands  of 
society,  as  it  is  called,  have  been  allowed  to 
interfere  ;  and  fashionable  schools  have  lived  by 
fashion  rather  than  by  merit.  One  of  the  ablest 
teachers  of  a  private  high  school  in  Boston  tes- 
tified that  her  school  suddenly  rose  to  unex- 
ampled popularity  without  any  internal  changes, 
because  one  or  two  fashionable  girls  entered 
it ;  and  it  as  suddenly  settled  back  to  its  usual 
numbers  because  they  and  their  followers  left 
it  in  dudgeon  for  some  cause.  All  such  edu- 
cators know  the  frail  tenure  upon  which  they 
hold  their  city  schools  ;  and  even  gentlemen 
who  have  taught  young  ladies'  schools  have 


70  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

experienced  the  same  sudden  reverses.  In  the 
late  movement  for  higher  education  in  Boston, 
one  of  the  most  earnest  women  in  the  cause, 
when  it  was  suggested  to  her  that  the  girls  in 
high  life  did  not,  as  far  as  educators  could  judge, 
care  for  higher  education,  replied,  "  We  must 
make  it  fashionable,  and  then  they  will  care 
for  it." 

•  No,  the  demand  comes  from  a  very  different 
quarter,  —  from  those  whose  means  cannot  com- 
mand facilities  to  meet  literary,  artistic,  or  scien- 
tific aspirations,  and  who  are  willing  to  make 
sacrifices  for  education.  If  Dr.  Clarke  had 
assailed  the  abuses  of  society,  —  children's  par- 
ties, fashionable  dress  in  its  features  of  bare 
neck  and  limbs,  thin  shoes,  sudden  change  of 
costume,  late  hours,  and  a  thousand  hardships 
and  exposures  to  which  the  less  favored  classes 
of  society  are  subjected,  —  he  would  have  done 
better  service  than  by  discouraging  women's 
systematic  education,  and  throwing  obstacles  in 
the  path  of  their  culture.  Still  deeper,  I  would 
again  testify,  is  the  wrong  he  has  done  to 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

women  by  assailing  those  who  devote 
lives  to  charity,  to  their  own  culture  and  to  the 
culture  of  others,  and  whom  those  who  know 
them  feel  would  be  profaned  by  worldly  mar- 
riages. The  children  they  act  for  rise  up  and 
call  them  blessed,  and  by  their  affection  go  far 
toward  making  up  to  them  for  the  lost  rapture 
of  actual  motherhood. 


72  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


IV. 

BY   ADA    SHEPARD    BADGER. 

No  thoughtful  reader  can  fail  to  appreciate 
the  nobleness  of  the  purpose  that  actuated  Dr. 
Clarke  in  writing  "  Sex  in  Education."  No  lov- 
ing and  thinking  mother  can  lay  aside  the  book, 
after  reading  the  first  pages,  until  the  whole  is 
perused.  But  no  candid  woman  teacher,  with 
the  interests  of  education  for  girls  deeply  at 
heart,  can  quietly  allow  Dr.  Clarke's  statement 
to  pass  without  wishing  to  suggest  essential 
modifications  of  its  main  idea. 

In  her  double  capacity  of  teacher  and  mother, 
the  writer  of  the  present  article  begs  leave  to 
call  the  attention  of  other  mothers  and  teachers 
to  a  few  facts  bearing  upon  the  other  side  of 
this  quczstio  vexata. 

And,  to  begin  with  that  branch  of  the  subject 
which  is  least  essential,  since  education  stands 


SEX  AND  EDUCATIOX.  73 

\>zimz  co-education  in  all  minds, —  and,  so  that  we 
obtain  the  former,  we  will  not  insist  too  strongly 
upon  the  latter,  —  Dr.  Clarke  quotes  the  opinion 
of  "a  philanthropist  and  an  intelligent  observer," 
holding  an  official  connection  with  a  college  for 
men  and  women,  that  "  the  co-education  of  the 
sexes  is  intellectually  a  success,  physiologically 
a  failure."  He  does  not  state  the  facts  from 
which  this  inference  is  drawn.  Doubtless  this 
observer  has  known  instances  where  women  who 
studied  in  classes  with  men  finally  succumbed  to 
disease,  as  did  some  of  their  male  classmates,  in 
all  probability. 

But  what  gives  him  the  power  to  decide  that 
the  proportion  of  the  sufferers  among  the  female 
graduates  is  greater  than  that  among  their  male 
classmates,  or  that  the  seeds  of  the  particular 
form  of  malady  which  has  prostrated  any  woman 
student  were  not  sown,  before  the  birth  of  the 
latter,  in  the  organism  of  a  mother  to  whose 
youth  the  opportunity  for  a  liberal  education  was 
denied  ?  And  how  can  he  know  that  their  very 
origin  was  not  attributable  to  the  lack  of  that 

4 


74  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

knowledge  of  physiology  requisite  to  instruct  a 
woman  as  to  the  commonest  facts  with  regard  to 
the  care  of  herself  required  by  the  approach  of 
the  sacred  office  of  maternity  ?  And  what  proba- 
bility is  there  that,  had  the  sufferer  in  question 
pursued  one  of  the  alternatives  to  a  student's 
course,  a  life  of  fashionable  folly,,  or  even  one  of 
common  toiling,  uninspired  by  the  light  of  a 
newly  awakened  intellectual  life,  these  germs  of 
disease  would  have  been  less  likely  to  come  to 
fruition  ?  What  are  the  grounds  of  belief  that 
regular  study  is  a  prominent  cause  of  physical 
degeneracy  ? 

Facts  of  the  nature  of  those  stated  by  Dr. 
Clarke  (in  Part  III.,  chiefly  clinical)  would 
doubtless  be  adduced  by  the  observer  above 
cited,  were  he  called  upon  to  substantiate  his 
opinion.  But,  could  we  look  at  any  one  of  these 
cases  with  the  power  to  judge  the  hidden  as 
well  as  the  revealed  causes  in  operation,  con- 
sidering also  what  would  have  been  the  probable 
alternative  adopted  by  the  individual  in  question, 
had  study  not  been  her  chief  pursuit,  is  it  not 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  ?$ 

quite  possible  that  the  conclusion  at  which  we 
should  arrive  would  contradict  that  of  the  work 
before  us  ? 

One  of  the  most  striking  cases  mentioned  in 
Part  III.  chances  to  have  been  known  to  the 
writer  from  the  earliest  infancy  of  the  subject 
And,  although  the  details  of  such  a  case  are 
forbidden  by  many  considerations,  the  circum- 
stance of  studying  in  and  being  graduated  with 
honor  at  a  college  planned  for  both  sexes,  and 
in  which,  indeed,  she  remained  through  the 
senior  year  only,  was  but  a  slight  cause  among 
the  many  that  converged  to  menace,  and  finally 
to  overcome,  that  rarely  endowed  but  perilously 
poised  organization.  The  congenial  pursuit  of 
the  studies  that  were  so  large  a  part  of  her  life 
probably  delayed  for  years  a  result  that  dis- 
cerning observers  saw  imminent  for  her  from  the 
dawning  of  her  conscious  life.  Neither  "  death 
from  over-work,"  nor  "  death  from  unphysiolog- 
ical  work,"  was  a  verdict  to  pass  unchallenged 
in  her  case. 

Who  that  looked  upon  Story's  bust  of  Eliza- 


76  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

beth  Browning  could  come  away  without  a  sym- 
pathetic tingling,  as  it  were,  of  the  whole  being, 
from  the  possibilities  of  suffering  —  beyond  the 
conception  of  most  mortals  —  revealed  in  that 
exquisitely  sensitive  face  ? 

But  Mrs.  Browning  did  not  go  to  a  man's 
college,  or  to  any  college.  She  studied  with 
her  father  at  home,  and  could  take  all  the  rests 
required  by  the  needs  of  her  physical  life.  No 
college  routine,  but,  possibly,  the  very  absence 
of  its  regularity,  was  responsible  for  her  suffer- 
ings throughout  her  life.  God  wrote  on  her 
organism  the  lines  that  could  not  be  effaced  by 
time  or  circumstance. 

Yet  she  could  write,  in  that  patient  sweetness 
which  was  more  wonderful  than  her  version  of 
"  Prometheus  Bound,"  or  her  "  Drama  of  Exile," 
and  which  made  her  a  glorious  woman  more 
essentially  than  a  gifted  poet :  — 

"  Oh  !  we  live,  —  Oh  !  we  live,  — 
And  this  life  that  we  conceive 
Is  a  strong  thing  and  a  grave, 
Which  for  others'  use  we  have, 
Duty-laden  to  remain. 


?Sv 

^TY 
SEX  AND  EDUCATIONS  77 


We  are  helpers,  fellow-creatures, 
Of  the  right  against  the  wrong  :  — 
We  are  earnest-hearted  teachers 
Of  the  truth  that  maketh  strong,  — 
Yet  do  we  teach  in  vain  ?  " 

No  generalizations  can  be  drawn  from  one 
case,  or  from  seven  cases,  of  women  who  have 
become  invalids  after  working  continuously  "  in 
a  man's  way."  Far  more  numerous  cases  might 
be  cited,  by  physicians  and  teachers,  of  girls  who 
were  seized  upon  by  the  Proteus  of  disease,  as 
a  retribution,  let  us  think,  for  not  having  worked 
with  the  method  of  "  a  man's  way,"  or  for  not 
having  worked  at  all.  Nowhere  in  our  own 
country  does  the  average  woman  present  so 
feeble  and  diseased  an  aspect  as  in  those  parts 
of  the  West  and  South  where  education  is  of  the 
smallest  moment  to  her.  Lacking  the  delicate 
beauty  and  the  intellectual  tastes  of  the  New 
England  girl,  she  also  leads  a  life  of  greater 
physical  suffering,  and  a  more  hopeless  inca- 
pacity for  usefulness.  Is  unremitting  study  a 
cause  of  the  weakness  of  the  Georgia  planter's 
wife  or  the  Cincinnati  merchant's  daughter? 


?8  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

Facts  in  the  writer's  possession,  through  an 
intimate  acquaintance,  during  the  first  ten  years 
of  its  existence,  with  one  of  our  Western  col- 
leges, established  for  the  joint  education  of  the 
sexes,  are  somewhat  significant  as  indicating 
whether,  notwithstanding  the  many  difficulties 
under  which  this  infant  college  was  obliged  to 
struggle  on,  the  education  there  given  to  girls 
was  destructive  or  constructive.  Out  of  twenty- 
seven  women  graduates  (all  that  memory  can 
recall  in  the  absence  of  catalogues  which  might 
permit  a  full  statement),  nineteen  have  married, 
and  eight  have  remained  unmarried,  so  far  as 
the  writer  knows.  Out  of  these  twenty-seven, 
graduating  between  1857  and  1863,  one  only  has 
died.  All  but  three,  whose  post-graduate  his- 
tory has  been  unreported,  are  known  to  have 
done  effective  work,  for  a  longer  or  shorter  term 
of  years,  in  educational  and  other  departments  ; 
and  a  large  number  of  them  have  blooming  fam- 
ilies to  "rise  up  and  call  them  blessed."  The 
writer  has  never  heard  of  but  three  cases  of 
even  temporary  invalidism  among  these  women 


t>EX  AND  EDUCATION.  79 

graduates,  while  a  large  number  of  the  male 
students  of  the  same  classes  have  died,  or  been 
prostrated  by  grievous  maladies.  One  of  the 
three  cases  just  referred  to  was  the  indisposition 
for  some  months  of  a  lady  who  has  since  recov- 
ered ;  and  who  has  recently  taken  her  eldest  son 
to  Germany,  to  pursue  there  her  favorite  study 
of  music,  to  which  she  has  consecrated,  as  pupil 
and  teacher,  a  great  part  of  her  time  for  over 
twenty  years.  Another,  confessedly  bearing 
away  the  first  honors  of  a  class  in  which  were 
graduated  two  of  our  successful  Unitarian 
preachers,  is  now  rearing  a  rosy  family  of  boys 
on  the  shore  of  a  Western  lake,  having  taught 
most  successfully  for  years  in  a  high  school. 

Another,  yet  unmarried,  is  continuing  her 
studies  in  England,  where  her  rare  powers  and 
ripe  culture  are  winning  for  her  the  appreciation 
she  years  ago  won  from  that  long-time  friend  of 
a  wise  co-education,  the  editor  of  the  "  Liberal 
Christian,"  who  wrote  of  her  in  glowing  terms 
from  St.  Louis,  the  former  field  of  her  work. 

Another  of  these  graduates,  the  mother  of  six 


80  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

remarkably  fine,  healthy  children,  is  giving  her 
husband  the  most  efficient  assistance  in  his  work 
at  the  head  of  a  Theological  School  in  Eastern 
New  York. 

Here,  then,  is  a  class  of  facts,  small,  it  is  true, 
but  significant  as  to  some  not  unhappy  results 
of  a  liberal  education  for  women,  even  though 
obtained  "  in  a  man's  way."  "  By  their  fruits 
ye  shall  know  them,"  said  another  Good  Phy- 
sician. 

"  In  the  development  of  the  organization  is  to 
be  found  the  way  of  strength  and  power  for  both 
sexes,"  says  Dr.  Clarke.  "  Limitation  or  abor- 
tion of  development  leads  to  weakness  and 
failure." 

Had  these  women  been  denied  the  privileges 
of  education  which  their  natures  craved  so  ear- 
nestly that  they  were  willing,  in  some  cases,  to  go 
alone  to  a  distant  State  ;  to  borrow  money  to 
defray  their  school  expenses,  so  that  the  first- 
fruits  of  their  after-work  went  to  cancel  these 
arrearages  ;  to  give  up  the  attractions  of  life  in 
New  England,  at  the  age  when  its  charms  are 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  8 1 

most  alluring  ;  to  spend,  in  a  new  country,  in 
privation  and  close  study,  years  that  might 
otherwise  have  been  squandered  in  dissipation 
or  wasted  in  futile  attempts  to  teach  at  the 
enormous  disadvantage  of  inadequate  prepara- 
tion ;  had  these  women  been  denied  the  edu- 
cation they  struggled  for  and  obtained  in  the 
only  way  then  possible,  who  knows  what  hydra- 
headed  maladies  might  now  be  racking  their 
bodies  and  distracting  their  brains  ?  Study, 
severe  study,  if  you  will,  was  their  safeguard, 
not  their  peril,  even  in  a  physical  point  of  view. 
Dr.  Clarke  justly  —  shall  we  say  generously? 
—  concedes  the  right  of  women  to  the  highest 
culture  of  which  they  are  capable.  But  the 
point  of  his  argument  turns^  upon  the  method 
of  obtaining  this  culture.  And  just  here,  in  a 
man's  view  of  the  case,  seems  a  mighty  diffi- 
culty arising.  .  But  put  one  or  two  wise,  mother- 
ly women  on  the  faculty  of  each  college  where 
girls  are  admitted,  (and  what  advocate  for  the 
liberal  culture  of  women  would  think  of  sending 
girls  to  study  where  men  alone  preside  ?)  and 


82  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

t 

woman's  wit  will  speedily  solve  the  great  prob- 
lem of  "  the  periodical  remission  from  labor." 

'Assume  that  each  girl  student  must  rest 
entirely  from  brain-work  three  days  out  of  every 
thirty,  and  the  average  of  work  could  be  easily 
brought  up  by  a  little  exercise  of  common  sense 
on  the  part  of  teacher  and  pupil.  But  it  is  not 
to  be  assumed  that  every  girl,  or  that  one  girl 
out  of  ten,  must  rest  three  days,  or  even  one 
day,  out  of  thirty.  Not  unfrequently  girls  who 
afterwards  developed  into  sound,  healthy  matrons, 
standing  the  wear  and  tear  of  life  in  a  manner  to 
astonish  vigorous  men  hardly  able  to  hold  their 
own  in  the  rush  of  our  American  life,  have  been 
known  to  attend,  without  a  single  exception, 
every  recitation  of  their  classes  for  years,  even 
when  going  daily  from  quite  a  distance  to  school 
or  college.  A  moderate  and  regular  use  of  the 
mental  faculties,  such  as  should  alone  be  per- 
mitted in  our  schools  and  colleges,  with  ample 
margins  each  week  for  the  exigencies  of  life  for 
both  sexes,  has  been  again  and  again  proved  to 
be  conducive  to  the  highest  physical  health  for 
women  as  well  as  men. 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  83 

A  few  years  ago  a  young  girl  of  sixteen,  who 
had  left  school  under  a  physician's  advice,  be- 
cause of  certain  irregularities  in  her  physical 
health,  was  rapidly  passing  into  such  a  state  of 
apathy  to  things  ordinarily  attractive  to  the 
young,  that  wise  friends  feared  the  result  of  in- 
sanity. As  a  last  resort,  she  was  placed  in  a 
school  where,  amid  pleasant  companionship,  her 
faculties  were  gently  though  regularly  stimulated. 
She  soon  began  to  revive  under  a  regimen  of 
mathematics,  languages,  and  art-culture,  and  in 
two  years  was  in  a  state  of  perfect  health.  Dur- 
ing these  entire  two  years  she  was  not  absent 
from  school  more  than  three  times,  nor  did  she 
ever  fail  to  prepare  a  lesson.  Here  regularity  of 
study  was  not  a  source  of  disease,  but,  appar- 
ently, its  cure. 

But  the  instances  in  point,  thronging  the  mind 
of  the  writer,  would  tax  the  patience  of  the 
reader  unjustifiably.  Passing  over  those  omis- 
sions and  oversights  in  the  book,  so  happily 
specified  in  notices  like  that  of  the  "  Advertiser  " 
and  the  "  Liberal  Christian,"  a  few  words  more 


84  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

must  close  this  already  too  long  reference  to  this 
timely  and,  in  many  respects,  valuable  essay. 

The  evil  to  which  our  wise  and  kind  physician 
refers,  is  surely  not  to  be  overlooked.  It  exists  ; 
it  stares  at  us  from  early  graves,  and,  far  worse, 
from  homes  whose  central  figures  are  afflicted 
with  life-long  sufferings  before  which  the  stout- 
est-hearted men  might  quail. 

What  is  its  remedy  ?  Does  our  earnest-hearted 
friend  propose  one  which  the  exigencies  of  life 
will  permit  women  to  adopt  ?  Has  any  writer 
suggested  a  cure  for  this  menacing  ill? 

If  a  warning  trumpet  is  to  be  blown,  shall  no 
one  be  found  to  herald  also  the  hope  of  better 
things  ? 

Let  a  woman's  voice  be  heard  pleading,  not 
for  less  work  or  less  constant  work,  but  for  a 
wiser  method  of  work  in  our  schools !  Let  a 
ban  be  put  upon  public  exhibitions  of  both  boys 
and  girls  in  schools  !  Let  the  worry  arising 
from  a  false  system  of  marks  for  recitations,  and 
from  all  comparisons  and  competitions,  be  ban- 
ished forever !  Let  the  notion  that  girls  must 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  8$ 

recite  all  their  lessons  while  standing  vanish 
from  the  minds  of  both  teachers  and  physicians ! 
The  use  of  the  feet  is  not  essential  to  a  good  lo  (  a 

jOLtft 

translation  from  Homer  or  Goethe ;  and  even 
the  Calculus  has  been  mastered  by  students  who, 
for  the  most  part,  sat  at  recitations.  Let  even- 
ing parties,  and  the  various  forms  of  tempting 
amusements  which  beset  our  young  people  while 
attending  to  the  serious  work  of  their  education, 
be  as  strictly  forbidden  to  them  as  they  are 
to  their  infant  brothers  and  sisters  yet  in  the 
nursery!  Let  the  tyrannous  fashion-plate  be 
consulted  less  than  the  laws  of  harmonious  col- 
oring and  real  fitness  of  contour! 

Above  all,  let  the  beginnings  be  right  I  Re- 
member that  far  more  valuable  work  can  be  done 
for  the  education  of  any  human  being,  and  espe- 
cially of  a  girl,  by  reason  of  her  threefold  nature, 
between  the  ages  of  seven  and  fourteen  than 
between  fourteen  and  nineteen.  Let  our  girls 
remain  girls  till  they  have  reached  the  estate  of 
womanhood.  Let  their  development  be  gradual 
and  normal,  not  forced  and  spasmodic ;  and  we 


86  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

shall  have  no  hothouse  flowers  to  fade  and  die 
at  the  first  touch  of  the  ruder  air  of  real  life,  but 
blossoms  that  are  the  pledge  of  coming  fruit. 

It  would  be  unjust  and  ungrateful  in  any  wo- 
man not  to  recognize  the  fact  that  Dr.  Clarke's 
book  was  necessarily  written  in  haste,  in  hours 
snatched  from  his  absorbing  labors  in  alleviating 
the  sufferings  of  those  for  whose  good  he  wrote. 
It  was  doubtless  this  haste  that  rendered  possi- 
ble such  a  verbal  error  as  occurs  on  page  35, 
where  he  hides  the  venerable  Ulysses,  instead 
of  the  youthful  Achilles,  among  the  maidens. 

In  conclusion,  we  would  insist  not  only  that 
the  diseases  so  often  referred  to  do  not  originate 
generally  in  the  schools,  but  that  the  only  way 
in  which  they  can  be  reached  and  cured  is 
through  the  instruction  imparted  and  the  reg- 
ularity of  life,  in  all  its  details,  required  by  wisely 
conducted  schools,  covering  the  whole  period 
from  early  girlhood  to  full  maturity. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  8/ 


V. 

BY  CAROLINE   H.   DALL. 

"THE  hand  of  iron  in  the  glove  of  silk!"  How 
utter  one  word  in  the  face  of  testimony  like 
this,  —  honest,  conscientious,  earnest ;  adding  to 

* 

the  highest  professional  reputation  all  the  force 
of  a  pure  and  noble  individual  character  ?  How 
do  it,  still  further,  in  the  face  of  personal  ob- 
ligations accumulating  for  more  than  twenty 
years,  and  of  that  loving  respect  with  which  the 
physician  who  is  also  priest  is  held  in  every 
household  ?  I  have  anticipated  this  book  with 
pain.  I  lay  it  down  with  pain,  far  sharper  and 
far  different  from  any  that  I  foresaw.  I  start 
from  the  same  premises  with  Dr.  Clarke  ;  for  I 
believe  the  spiritual  and  intellectual  functions 
of  men  and  women  to  tend  differently  to  their 
one  end  ;  and  their  development  to  this  end, 
through  the  physical,  to  be  best  achieved  by  dif- 


88  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

ferent  methods.  But  I  do  not  believe  that  any 
greater  difference  of  capacity,  whether  physical 
or  psychical,  will  be  found  between  man  and 
woman  than  is  found  between  man  and  man  ; 
and  my  faith  in  the  co-education  of  the  sexes 
has  been  greatly  stimulated  by  the  present  in- 
elastic method,  from  which  many  boys  do  shrink 
as  much  as  any  girl  could. 

Under  a  proper  system  boys  and  girls  help 
each  other  forward,  not  merely  towards  excel- 
lent scholarship,  but  towards  a  perfect  human- 
ity,—  that  is,  a  perfect  self-possession,  —  the 
attainment  for  each  of  a  sound  mind  in  a  sound 
body.  To  understand  this,  however,  not  even 
the  President  of  Harvard  will  find  possible  un- 
less he  does  more  than  look  at  a  mixed  college. 
To  have  any  fair  comprehension  of  the  elements 
which  constitute  its  power  for  good  or  evil,  it  is 
necessary  to  pass  at  least  a  week  within  its 
walls,  sharing  the  "  college  commons  "  and  the 
college  recreations  ;  studying  its  whole  action  as 
if  it  were  a  large  family. 

When  I  laid  down  this  book  I  felt  the  empha- 


S-EX  AND  EDUCATION.  89 

sis  of  my  pain  in  a  direction  wholly  unexpected. 
Every  woman  who  takes  up  her  pen  to  reject 
its  conclusions  knows  very  well  that  it  will 
penetrate  hundreds  of  households  where  her 
protest  cannot  follow ;  and  Dr.  Clarke  must  be 
patient  with  the  number  and  weight  of  our  re- 
monstrances, since  he  knows  very  well  that 
upon  the  major  part  of  the  community  our 
words  will  fall  with  no  authority,  our  experiences 
invite  no  confidence.  We  must  gain  the  public 
ear  by  constant  iteration,  and  by  our  "  impor- 
tunity "  prevail.  This  book  will  fall  into  the 
hands  of  the  young,  and  that  I  deplore.  They 
should  be  taught  the  proper  care  of  their  grow- 
ing bodies  ;  but  any  such  cases  of  disease  as 
are  here  recorded  are  fruitful  of  evil  stimulus 
to  any  girl  inclined  to  hysterics.  If  this  subject 
ought  to  be  discussed  publicly  at  all,  a  matter 
open  to  doubt,  teachers  and  mothers  should  dis- 
cuss it.  No  amount  of  professional  skill  can 
avail  in  place  of  that  sympathetic  intuition  of 
causes  which  should  spring  from  identical  physi- 
cal constitution.  In  no  pages  that  I  ever  read 


90  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

is  the  need  of  educated  women  physicians  so 
painfully  apparent  as  in  these.  I  expected  to 
find  premises  from  which  I  should  dissent,  but, 
with  the  exception  of  that  upon  which  the  book 
is  based,  I  did  not  find  any ;  and,  so  far  as  it 
is  an  argument  against  co-education,  the  book 
utterly  fails. 

Co-education  does  not  necessarily  include 
identical  methods  ;  and,  if  it  did,  Dr.  Clarke's 
examples  of  broken  constitutions  are  brought 
from  the  clerk's  desk,  the  theatre,  and  the 
woman's  college,  as  well.  His  examples  have  no 
statistical  value ;  for  nothing  is  told  us  of  their 
proportion  to  the  whole  number  of  students  of 
the  other  sex  under  the  same  precise  conditions, 
or  to  the  failures  in  the  same  number  of  girls 
educated  tenderly  at  home.  When  the  book 
passes  from  the  methods  of  education  to  the 
effect  of  those  methods  on  womanly  functions, 
the  treatment  of  the  subject  is  both  one-sided 
and  incomplete.  The  only  proper  place  for  a 
discussion  of  the  latter  in  extenso  is  the  columns 
of  a  medical  journal ;  but  this  book  is  intended 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  91 

for  popular  use,  and  to  the  people  must  those 
who  criticise  it  appeal. 

The  most  painful  thing  in  the  book  is  its  tone. 
Mr.  Higginson  has  said  that  it  is  not  coarse ! 
Surely  never  was  a  sentence  written  that  more 
eloquently  betrayed  the  need  women  have  to 
speak  for  themselves  !  Women  read  this  essay 
with  personal  humiliation  and  dismay.  A  cer- 
tain materialistic  taint  is  felt  throughout  the 
whole,  such  as  saddens  most  of  our  intercourse 
with  our  young  physicians,  but  which  we  had 
hoped  never  to  associate  with  this  man,  so  long 
and  so  justly  revered.  The  natural  outgrowth 
of  this  tone  are  the  sneers  which  disfigure  its 
pages,  the  motto  from  Plautus,  and  a  few  most 
unhappy  illustrations. 

These  things  might  be  easily  forgiven  to  the 
immature  student,  as  we  pardon  the  rude  man- 
ners of  growing  boys  ;  but  should  not  our  friend 
have  denied  himself  the  small  relief  of  their 
utterance  ?  We  cannot  excuse  the  trait  merely 
because  the  work  has  been  undertaken  in  the 
midst  of  more  pressing  cares.  We  feel  that  it 


92  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

indicates  something  in  the  author  which  is  no 
accident.  We  do  not  accept  it  as  suitable  in 
the  "  beloved  physician  "  for  whose  delicate  and 
thoughtful  care  so  many  have  been  grateful. 
He,  at  least,  should  have  given  us  pages  that  a 
woman  might  read  without  a  blush. 

We  are  sorry  that  he  thought  it  worth  while 
to  invent  a  word  to  give  point  to  his  sneer.  If 
there  are  any  "  agenes  "  in  the  world,  surely  we 
do  not  find  them  in  the  women  who,  seeking  to 
do  some  good  work  in  the  world,  have  sought 
the  development  of  their  best  powers  in  ways 
unwise  or  absurd,  and  have  in  consequence 
failed  to  satisfy  the  yearnings  that  they  feel. 
"  Other  tasks  in  other  worlds  "  await  them,  and 
the  yearning  may  still  prove  the  germ  of  a  com- 
pleted development.  The  true  "  agenes "  are 
the  men  who  have  lost  manhood  through  vicious 
courses,  and  whose  innocent  wives  will  never 
hear  the  voices  of  their  children  in  consequence. 
We  look  from  the  possible  mother  to  the  father, 
and  I  mean  all  that  my  words  imply.  It  is  the 
testimony  of  one  even  more  familiar  with  the 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  93 


nursery  and  the  sick-room  than  with  the  theo-f 
ries  of  the  platform.     The  vices  of  men  imperil 
the  populations  of  the  earth  far  more  than  the 
unwise  studies  of  women. 

Very  painful,  also,  is  the  witness  these  pages 
bear  to  the  small  number  of  wise  and  noble 
mothers  among  us,  —  women  who  can  so  im- 
press themselves  upon  their  daughters  that 
they  should  follow  modest  and  wholesome 
courses,  as  if  by  instinct  or  habit,  and  should 
shrink  from  all  the  possible  unwomanly  expos- 
ure which  has  made  these  pages  necessary. 
Our  author  quotes  a  letter  from  a  German 
mother,  as  if  it  could  not  have  been  written 
here.  But  the  mothers  of  all  my  schoolmates 
lived  as  if  they  had  written  it,  and  it  gives  the 
experience  of  that  portion  of  present  society 
who  believe  in  motherly  influence  and  exercise 
motherly  care.  It  is  true  that  there  are  "  fast " 
young  women,  with  whom  the  restraints  of 
proper  feeling  do  not  prevail ;  but  distinctions 
should  be  made  in  the  writing.  Refined  and 
thoughtful  women  should  be  credited  with  their 


94  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

actual  habits.  Dr.  Clarke  has  lost  a  most  pre- 
cious opportunity.  It  was  in  his  power  to 
stamp  the  objectionable  mode  of  life  with  its 
real  vulgarity.  If  any  fathers  would  but  guard 
their  sons  as  many  women  still  know  how  to 
guard  their  daughters !  The  revelations  of  this 
book  are  enough  to  chill  any  one  with  horror. 

In  the  writing  of  this  book  acknowledged 
statistics  seem  to  have  been  wholly  overlooked. 
More  female  infants  than  male  survive  the 
perils  of  infancy,  and  more  girls  mature  into 
womanhood  than  boys  into  manhood.  Will 
any  one  who  looks  carefully  at  the  immature 
half-developed  figures  of  our  young  men,  or 
keeps  the  record  of  their  vitality,  claim  that  it 
is  superior  to  that  of  women  ? 

In  all  books  that  concern  the  education  of 
women,  one  very  important  fact  is  continually 
overlooked. 

Women,  and  even  young  girls  at  school,  take 
their  studies  in  addition  to  their  home-cares. 
If  boys  are  preparing  for  college,  they  do  not 
have  to  take  care  of  the  baby,  make  the  beds, 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  95 

or  help  to  serve  the  meals.  A  great  many  girls 
at  the  High  Schools  do  all  this.  Then,  if  a 
man  who  is  a  student  marries,  he  is  carefully 
protected  from  all  annoyance.  His  study  is 
sacred,  his  wife  does  the  marketing.  If  his 
baby  cries,  he  sleeps  in  the  spare  room. 

So  far  women  have  written  in  the  nursery 
or  the  dining-room,  often  with  one  foot  on  the 
cradle.  They  must  provide  for  their  households, 
and  nurse  their  sick,  before  they  can  follow  any 
artistic  or  intellectual  bent. 

When  it  is  once  fairly  acknowledged  that 
women  properly  have  a  vocation,  they  may  be 
protected  in  it  as  a  man  is.  At  present  there 
is* no  propriety  in  making  comparisons  of  re- 
sults in  regard  to  the  two  sexes. 

It  is  in  "  education  "  that  Dr.  Clarke  seems 
to  find  the  sole  source  of  numerous  evils.  It  is 
true  that  he  alludes  to  bad  food  and  bad  habits 
of  dress,  but  so  slightly  that  the  reader  might 
be  justified  in  forgetting  it.  Of  dissipation  and 
precocious  folly  there  is  scarce  a  word.  He 
alludes  to  "  the  pallor  of  our  women  "  as  if  it 


96  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

were  a  new  thing,  whereas  the  second  genera- 
tion born  upon  these  shores  bore  witness  to  it. 
It  was  observed  by  travellers  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years  ago.  As  to  the  endurance  of  the 
duties  of  motherhood,  and  the  proportion  of 
surviving  children  born  to  them,  our  women  are 
far  in  advance  of  the  first  generation,  born  and 
reared  across  the  water.  It  was  a  rare  thing  in 
that  generation  for  man  and  wife  to  live  together 
through  the  whole  natural  period  of  conjugal  life. 
The  men  lived  long  ;  but  they  had  two,  three, 
four,  and  —  more  frequently  than  any  one  would 
believe  who  had  not  examined — five  wives.  Nor 
can  this  be  accounted  for  on  the  ground  that  the 
women  were  subj  ect  to  uncommon  hardship.  The 
settlers  of  Ipswich,  for  example,  were  wealthy  ; 
they  built  houses  more  comfortable  than  those 
they  had  left  ;  and  they  testify  that  one  of  their 
motives  in  coming  to  this  country  was  the  lack 
of  pure  water  and  good  drainage  in  the  old. 
Still  their  wives  perished  by  the  score.  "  The 
wind  at  Madrid  will  not  blow  out  a  candle," 
says  the  old  Spanish  proverb,  "  but  it  can  kill 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  97 

a  man."  The  change  of  climate  was  at  the 
bottom  of  this  early  fatality.  The  condition  of 
things  steadily  improved  to  the  happy  time  that 
we  all  remember.  If  the  last  thirty  years  has 
checked  the  steady  gain,  let  us  consider  patient- 
ly the  era  of  French  fashions,  vices,  and  habits, 
the  era  of  unnatural  hours  and  pastimes.  The 
movement  in  behalf  of  the  higher  education  of 
woman  is  a  very  modern  movement.  No  single 
generation  can  be  said  to  have  matured  under 
its  influence.  It  is  too  early  to  examine  the 
results,  but  this  is  certain:  whatever  danger 
menaces  the  health  of  America,  it  cannot  thus 
far  have  sprung  from  the  over-education  of  her 
women. 

Mrs.  Badger  has  already  shown  that  the 
health  of  Southern  and  Western  women,  whose 
opportunities  of  education  have  been  small,  is 
even  lower  than  that  of  our  cultivated  classes, 
a  matter  easily  to  be  tested  by  any  one  who  will 
watch  the  crowd  pouring  out  of  a  western  rail- 
road station.  "  The  cerebral  processes  by  which 
knowledge  is  acquired  are  the  samp^Dt^JJq^ 

f  rmi 

UNIVERSITY 


98  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

sexes,"  says  Dr.  Clarke  ;  but  observing  women 
will  hardly  admit  this  statement.  I  believe  it 
would  be  hardly  possible  for  women  to  become 
students  if  the  processes  were  identical.  The 
slowest  woman  who  has  any  real  power  will  con- 
quer a  new  study  in  about  half  the  time  of  the 
average  male  student.  Her  method  she  does 
not  herself  understand.  She  has  ways  and 
means  which  are  not  apparent.  I  cannot  be- 
lieve that  any  "  Oriental  care  of  the  body  "  ever 
equalled  the  care  given  to  the  women  of  to-day  in 
America.  The  women  who  are  now  practising 
as  physicians  in  the  harems  of  Europe  and  Asia 
find  fearful  ignorance  and  absolute  superstition. 
For  myself  I  can  only  say  that  I  look  for  young 
women  of  the  strongest  physique  at  this  mo- 
ment within  the  walls  of  academies  and  colleges. 
The  regular  studies,  the  early  rising  and  retir- 
ing, the  exercises  in  the  gymnasium  and  the 
open  air,  the  companionship  with  charming  and 
cultivated  women  older  than  themselves,  all  tend 
to  the  most  perfect  health.  This  is  a  reproach 
to  our  homes,  and  perhaps  indicates  that  care- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  99 

lessness  in  mothers  which  was  always  avoided 
when  I  was  young,  not  so  much  because  its  re- 
.  suits  were  injurious  as  because  it  was  in  itself 
unwomanly  and  indelicate. 

Dr.  Clarke  fears  that  co-education  will  stimu- 
late women  to  attempt  what  the  method  of  their 
physical  life  renders  dangerous.  Why,  then, 
does  he  turn  from  Oberlin,  Antioch,  and  Cornell 
to  the  one  institution  where  co-education  has 
never  been,  and  will  never  be,  attempted,  and 
where  the  one  fact  of  the  resident  physician 
and  the  resident  "  lady  principal "  should  indi- 
cate to  the  most  careless  inspection  a  careful 
adaptation  to  womanly  needs  ?  Or  why,  if  he 
had  an  hysterical  patient  who  happened  to  have 
been  a  pupil  at  Vassar,  did  he  trust,  without 
examination,  to  her  statements  ?  I  may  chal- 
lenge an  audience  when  I  speak  of  Vassar ;  for 
it  is  against  my  will  if  it  fulfil  any  dream  of 
mine.  From  the  hour  that  it  first  went  into 
operation  I  have  been  its  frequent  visitor.  The 
president  and  faculty  might  have  banished  me 
as  a  spy,  so  thoroughly  committed  am  I  to  the 


I0o  SEX   AND    EDUCATION. 

cause  of  co-education.  Instead  they  welcomed 
me  warmly,  and  gave  me  liberty  and  opportu- 
nity to  detect  every  flaw. 

In  a  meeting  of  the  "  American  Association 
for  the  Promotion  of  Social  Science,"  held  last 
May,  I  drew  attention  to  the  superior  health  of 
the  girls  at  Vassar.  I  pointed  out  the  fact  that 
the  health  of  the  girls  continued  to  improve 
up  to  the  hour  of  graduation  ;  and  while  I  had 
in  my  audience  three  members  of  the  faculty, 
Miss  Maria  Mitchell,  the  resident  physician, 
Dr.  Avery,  and  President  Raymond  himself,  it 
was  observable  that  they  heard  me  with  indif- 
ference rather  than  pride,  so  perfectly  familiar 
were  they  with  the  fact.  The  parents  of  all  the 
pupils  are  also  familiar  with  it ;  and  if  Dr. 
Avery  were  at  any  moment  to  resign  her  re- 
sponsible post  she  would  receive  a  warm  wel- 
come in  any  community  that  had  sent  pupils  to 
Vassar.  The  world  may  be  challenged  to  pro- 
duce, in  any  one  neighborhood,  four  hundred 
young  women  of  so  great  physical  promise.  In 
the  following  June  I  met  .Miss  Mary  Carpen- 


SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 


ter  at  Vassar  by  appointment.  She 
amazement  how  close  the  actual 
the  pupils  came  to  the  curriculum  proposed  ; 
but  she  concluded  her  investigation  by  ejacu- 
lating, with  the  peculiar  emphasis  that  all  who 
know  her  will  recall,  "And  we  must  admit  that 
they  have  superior  health,  —  it  is  most  extraor- 
dinary !  "  This  was  the  testimony  of  one  accus- 
tomed to  the  "  rosebuds  "  in  England's  "garden 
of  girls."  In  regard  to  the  case  reported  by  Dr. 
Clarke  in  connection  with  Vassar  College,  I  was 
so  sure  that  there  was  some  mistake  that  I  wrote 
at  once  to  the  resident  physician,  and  she  will 
be  glad  to  be  held  responsible  for  the  following 
statements. 

The  points  will  be  perceived  if  the  reader  will 
refer  to  the  79th  page  of  "  Sex  in  Education." 
Vassar  College  does  not  receive  students  under 
fifteen,  even  for  the  first  preparatory  year  ;  and 
there  is  a  preparatory  course  of  two  years.  No 
student  ever  entered  the  freshman  class  at  four-  - 
teen.  At  the  beginning  of  every  collegiate 
year  the  students  are  carefully  instructed  re- 


102  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

garding  the  periodic  precautions  necessary  to 
their  health.  They  are  positively  forbidden  to 
take  gymnastics  at  all  during  the  first,  two  days 
of  their  period  ;  and,  if  there  is  the  slightest 
diseased  tendency,  are  told  to  forego  those  ex- 
ercises entirely.  They  are  forbidden  to  ride  on 
horseback,  and  are  strongly  advised  not  to 
dance,  nor  to  run  up  and  down  stairs,  nor  to  do 
any  thing  else  which  will  give  successive,  even 
though  gentle,  shocks  to  the  trunk.  They  are 
encouraged  to  go  out  of  doors  for  quiet  walks 
and  drives,  and  to  do  whatever  they  can  to 
steady  irritable  nerves  or  unnatural  excitement. 
That  a  student  should  faint  again  and  again  in 
the  gymnasium,  and  still  be  allowed  to  continue 
her  exercises  there,  is  a  statement  that  would 
not  be  made  by  any  one  familiar  with  the  per- 
sonal physical  care  given  at  Vassar  College, 
not  merely  by  the  resident  physician,  but  by  the 
teachers  acting  as  a  body.  It  is  a  statement 
that  will  be  believed  by  no  one  in  the  least 
familiar  with  the  college  methods.  The  faculty 
do  not  attempt  to  cut  down  the  work  of  each 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  103 

girl  periodically  ;  but  they  do  mean  to  so  regu- 
late the  work  of  the  whole  time  that  the  end  of 
no  day  shall  find  her  overtaxed,  even  though 
that  day  bear  an  unusual  burden.  The  average 
age  of  the  graduates  is  twenty-one  and  one- 
half.  The  present  freshman  class  numbers 
seventy-nine. 

The  girls  begin  the  work  of  the  year  at  the 
following  ages  :  — 

ii  between  20  and  23. 

14        „  19     „     20. 

23  „  18     „     19. 

24  „  17     „     18. 
6        „  16    „     17. 
i        »  15     »     l6- 

This  is  a  fair  average  class,  except  that  it  is 
singular  in  the  last  item.  That  is  almost  the 
only  instance  in  the  history  of  the  college  of  a 
student  entering  as  a  freshman  under  sixteen. 
Few  are  under  seventeen  ;  seventy-two  of  the 
seventy-nine  are  over  that  age.  Forty-eight,  or 
three-fifths,  are  over  eighteen.  "  Eighteen," 
writes  Dr.  Avery,  "is  young  ^ enough  for  any 
woman  to  begin  this  course.  At  that  age,  with 


104  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

an  average  endowment  of  mind  and  body,  she 
pursues  it  with  gladness  and  ends  it  with  re- 
joicing, as  many  of  our  classes  can  prove." 

I  consider  this  a  most  valuable  exhibit,  and  it 
is  the  book  before  us  that  has  called  it  out.  Vas- 
sar  never  yet  insisted  on  a  "  regimen  not  to  be 
distinguished  "  from  that  impressed  upon  boys, 
and  her  pupils  are  guided  physiologically  with  a 
watchful  tenderness  impossible  in  most  homes. 
Such  care  is  quite  as  much  needed  by  boys. 
Whenever  co-education  becomes  a  fact,  the  so- 
cial head  of  the  mixed  college  must  be  a  woman 
who  will  exercise  loving  motherly  care  for  both, 
and  who  will  find  no  practical  difficulty  in  the 
natural  differences. 

Of  one  other  case  cited  by  Dr.  Clarke  as  an 
instance  of  over  or  unwise  education,  I  had  an 
intimate  and  sorrowful  knowledge.  The  de- 
generacy imputed  to  excessive  culture  was,  in 
fact,  the  result  of  a  tendency  inherited  from  a 
vicious  father,  —  a  tendency  recognized  by  its 
unfortunate  subject  with  morbid  pain  from  the 
beginning. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  IO$ 

Nothing  will  pain  women  more  in  this  book 
than  the  assertion  that  "  old  age  is  sexless." 
Men  and  women  do  not  lose  the  distinctions  of 
perfect  womanhood  and  manhood  as  they  draw 
nearer  to  each  other,  unless  we  are  prepared  to 
account  these  purely  physical.  A  woman  ceases 
to  be  a  mother  only  to  fulfil  the  quite  as  sacred 
functions  of  the  grandmother.  She  is  set  free 
from  certain  cares  that  a  large  experience  of 
life  may  show  her  all  the  more  fit  for  certain 
other  cares,  both  social  and  philanthropic  ;  but 
if  she  be  not  to  her  heart's  core  womanly,  even 
at  the  age  of  eighty,  her  life  has  been  a  failure. 
Man,  ripening  alike  through  success  and  reverse, 
grows  nearer  to  woman  as  he  grows  old  ;  but  his 
advanced  life  is  also  worthless  if  it  cannot  offer 
manhood's  ripest  fruit  to  her  hand.  Sweet 
memories  of  happy  firesides,  where  the  winter 
blaze  crowned  snowy  heads  with  halos,  bring 
the  quick  tears  to  my  eyes  as  I  write.  God  be 
thanked  for  manhood  and  womanhood  completed 
at  fourscore,  as  I  recall  them  !  It  would  seem 
as  if  Dr.  Clarke  can  hardly  yet  understand  what 


106  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

a  blow  his  essay  deals  at  the  industry  of  woman. 
Did  the  world  accept  it,  the  movement  now  ad- 
vancing would  be  checked  in  the  bud.  Thou- 
sands of  women  are  thrown  upon  themselves 
for  self-support  at  the  age  of  fourteen.  The 
moment  that  school-tasks  are  remitted  three 
days  out  of  thirty,  clerks  will  leave  the  desk, 
servant-girls  their  accustomed  work,  shop-girls 
their  counters.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that 
male  labor  must  replace  service  as  intermittent 
as  this. 

I  Having  shown  what  the  facts  are  in  reference 
to  the  noblest  institution  for  the  culture  of 
girls,  I  will  add  that  I  am  utterly  tired  of  see- 
ing any  class  of  God's  creatures  singled  out 
for  especial  care.  Bad  habits,  houses  built 
like  packing-cases  set  on  end,  unwholesome 
food,  precocious  reading,  have  much  to  do  with 
the  ill-heath  of  American  women.  If  they  put 
their  money  into  comfort  instead  of  flounces, 
if  they  employed  two  servants  where  they  now 
have  six,  much  of  their  mental  lassitude  would 
disappear,  and  their  bodies  would  bear  witness 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  IO/ 

to  the  release.  It  is  time  that  a  generation  of 
healthy  men  were  provided  :  the  occult  causes 
lie  within  their  own  control. 

The  book  before  us  may  do  something  by 
rousing  mothers  and  daughters  to  contemplate 
the  situation  ;  but,  if  properly  trained  in  wise 
homes  towards  average  health,  the  ends  of  life 
will  be  far  better  served  by  the  women  who  for- 
get their  own  inconveniences  and  think  chiefly 
of  those  endured  by  others. 

Nothing  is  so  absurd  as  to  press  upon  a  young 
woman's  thought  the  idea  that  she  is  to  become 
a  mother.  What  if  she  is  ?  Let  her  make 
herself  a  healthy,  happy  human  being,  and  what 
will  may  befall.  What  would  be  thought  of  a 
community  which  definitely  undertook  to  train 
young  men  to  the  functions  and  duties  of  fath- 
ers ?  A  shout  of  derision  would  be  raised  at 
once.  "  Let  us  have  citizens ! "  the  world  would 
cry.  I  echo  the  demand.  Mothers  are  no  more 
important  to  the  race  than  fathers.  We  must 
gain  both  by  seeking  first  the  "  kingdom  of 
God."  People  should  live  out  their  young  and 


108  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

happy  days,  unconscious  of  this  issue,  as  the 
flowers  take  no  thought  of  seed.  This  is  best 
done  when  their  minds  are  occupied  with 
other  subjects  than  "periodicity"  or  "  develop- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  109 


VI. 
BY    C. 

A  FEW  years  ago  an  eminent  divine  felt  it  his 
mission  to  expound  to  woman  "  the  great  facts 
of  her  being."  He  began  his  harangue  with 
flattering  admissions  of  her  "  intuitions "  and 
"  delicacy  of  taste ; "  and,  having  thus  secured 
himself  a  hearing,  he  proceeded  to  declare  that 
"woman  cannot  compete  with  man  in  a  long 
course  of  mental  labor,"  and  that  "  as  for  train- 
ing young  ladies  through  a  long  intellectual 
course,  as  we  do  young  men,  it  can  never  be 
done,  —  they  will  die  in  the  process." 

With  the  same  conventional  concessions  to 
the  equality  of  the  sexes,  Dr.  Clarke  introduces 
his  plea  for  what,  with  great  adroitness,  he  calls, 
"  A  Fair  Chance  for  the  Girls." 

"Abstract  right  and  wrong,"  he  says,  "has 
nothing  to  do  with  sex.  What  is  right  or 


110  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

wrong  for  man  is  equally  right  or  wrong  for 
woman.  .  .  .  Both  have  a  right  to  do  the  best 
they  can,  or,  to  speak  more  justly,  both  should 
feel  the  duty  and  have  the  opportunity  to  do 
their  best.  .  .  .  Neither  is  there  any  such  thing 
as  superiority  or  inferiority  in  the  matter.  Man 
is  not  superior  to  woman,  nor  woman  to  man. 
The  relation  of  the  sexes  is  one  of  equality,  not 
of  better  and  worse,  or  of  a  higher  and  lower." 

"Timeo  Danaos  et  dona  ferentes." 

The  old  doctrine  of  woman's  sphere  shines 
with  equal  clearness  from  the  pages  of  Dr.  Todd 
and  Dr.  Clarke,  though  the  latter  carefully  avoids 
the  obnoxious  phrase.  Just  as  plainly,  though 
in  less  offensive  words,  does  Dr.  Clarke  announce 
his  belief  that  woman  was  made  for  man,  and 
that  maternity  is  her  only  divinely  appointed 
mission,  with  an  unmanly  sneer  at  those  who 
fail  to  fulfil  that  destiny. 

The  sneer  is  too  studied  to  be  accidental,  and 
is  to  me  the  unpardonable  sin  of  the  book.  Did 
the  author  willingly  expose  himself  to  justified 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  Ill 

attack  on  this  point,  for  the  express  purpose  of 
reaching  the  ear  and  heart  of  those  superlatively 
weak  women  whom  nothing  can  touch  but  a 
masculine  sneer?  Not  quite  believing  in  his 
own  arguments,  did  he  trust  to  satire  to  win  him 
approval  with  that  class  of  people  for  whom  his 
book  was  written  ?  Surely  he  is  not  so  ignorant 
as  not  to  know  that  the  jeer  will  only  weaken 
the  argument  with  all  thoughtful  people.  But 
was  the  book  written  for  the  thinking  people,  or 
for  those  whom  ridicule,  not  reason,  convinces  ? 
For  those  especially  who  fear  masculine  ridicule 
in  all  that  relates  to  their  external  attractions ; 
for  those  who  can  endure  all  loss  save  the  loss 
of  admiration  ;  for  those  on  whom  an  argument 
is  wasted,  while  a  sneer  converts  ?  One  may  fully 
believe  that  the  perfection  of  womanhood,  as  of 
manhood,  is  reached  in  a  true  marriage  ;  one 
may  dissent  from  the  opinion  that  man  and  wo- 
man, being  equal,  are  therefore  identical ;  one 
may  not  yet  be  fully  persuaded  in  her  own  mind 
that  the  co-education  of  the  sexes  is  desirable : 
yet  if  she  is  an  earnest  and  thoughtful  woman, 


1 12  SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION. 

as  anxious  for  the  intellectual  as  for  the  physical 
perfection  of  her  sex,  she  must  feel  the  gripe  of 
the  iron  hand  under  the  velvet  glove  in  all  Dr. 
Clarke's  admissions,  coupled  as  they  are  with 
such  limitations.  "Without  denying  the  self- 
evident  proposition,"  says  Dr.  Clarke,  "  that 
whatever  a  woman  can  do  she  has  a  right  to  do, 
the  question  at  once  arises,  what  can  she  do  ? 
and  this  includes  the  question,  what  can  she 
best  do  ?  ...  The  qucestio  vexata  of  woman's 
sphere  will  be  decided  by  her  organization. 
This  limits  her  power  and  reveals  her  divinely 
appointed  tasks.  .  .  .  Each  can  do  in  certain 
directions  what  the  other  cannot ;  and  in  other 
directions,  when  both  can  do  the  same  things, 
one  sex  as  a  rule  can  do  them  better  than  the 
other.  .  .  .  Many  of  the  efforts  for  bettering  her 
education  seem  to  treat  her  as  if  her  organiza- 
tion, and  consequently  her  function,  were  mas- 
culine, not  feminine.  .  .  .  The  lily  is  not  inferior 
to  the  rose,  nor  the  oak  superior  to  the  clover ; 
yet  the  glory  of  the  lily  is  one,  and  the  glory  of 
the  oak  is  another,  and  the  use  of  the  oak  is  not 
the  use  of  the  clover." 


S-EX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  1 1 3 

"  Whatever  a  woman  can  do  she  has  a  right  to 
do,"  is  so  plausible  as  to  satisfy  the  credulous, 
were  it  not  for  the  ungenerous  doubt  contained 
in  the  inquiry,  "  But  what  can  she  do  ?  and  what 
can  she  best  do  ?  "  —  questions  which  she  is  not 
to  be  allowed  to  settle  for  herself,  but  which  Dr. 
Clarke  hastens  to  answer  by  telling  her  "her 
organization  limits  her  power,  and  reveals  her 
divinely  appointed  tasks."  She  is  entitled  only 
to  what  she  can  attain  as  a  woman ;  and,  being 
a  woman,  her  attainment  is  limited  by  her  organ- 
ization. What  mother  or  teacher  would  have 
the  heart  to -say  to  the  healthy  girl  of  fifteen, 
just  becoming  conscious  of  her  mental  powers, 
"  My  girl,  hitherto  you  have  talked,  romped, 
chased  butterflies  and  climbed  fences,  loved, 
hated  (and  studied)  with  your  brother,  with  an 
innocent  abandon  that  is  ignorant  of  sex.  Here 
your  paths  must  diverge.  He  will  go  out  into 
the  world  free  to  attain  the  highest  mental  cul- 
ture of  which  a  human  being  is  capable.  You 
were  predestined  to  be  a  wife  and  a  mother,  and 
are  therefore  endowed  with  a  peculiar  organiza- 
H 


114  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

tion.  To  develop  that  organization  to  that  end 
becomes  now  your  duty  and  mine."  High  med- 
ical authority  has  declared  that  "  force  must  be 
allowed  to  flow  thither  in  an  ample  stream,  and 
not  be  diverted  to  the  brain  by  the  school ; "  and, 
as  the  system  never  does  two  things  well  at  the 
same  time,  you  must  no  longer  spend  in  the 
study  of  geography  and  arithmetic,  of  Latin, 
Greek,  and  chemistry,  in  the  brain-work  of  the 
school-room,  force  that  should  be  spent  in  phys- 
ical growth.  Your  power  is  limited  by  your 
organization.  What  robust  girl  to  whom  this 
should  be  said,  but  would  feel  her  sex  to  be  a 
galling  chain,  and  her  tasks  any  thing  but  di- 
vinely appointed  ?  "  The  use  of  the  clover  is 
not  the  use  of  the  oak,"  says  Dr.  Clarke.  "  You 
must  not  try  to  make  the  anemone  into  an  oak," 
says  Dr.  Todd.  Not  at  all.  I  only  find  it  diffi- 
cult to  believe  that  a  kind  Creator  intended  my 
mortal  body  to  be  a  hinderance  to  the  develop- 
ment of  my  immortal  mind,  which  physiology 
and  theology  both  assure  me  he  has  made  equal 
to  that  of  my  brother. 


SEX  AND  ED  L/C  A  TION.  1 1 5 

This  physiological  scare  is  the  most  insidious 
form  under  which  the  opposition  to  the  higher 
education  of  woman  has  yet  appeared.  I  speak 
advisedly  ;  for,  though  this  book  professes  to  be 
a  protest  against  the  co-education  of  the  sexes, 
and  even  against  their  separate  identical  educa- 
tion, I  think  it  will  be  felt  by  the  careful  reader 
to  be  a  protest  against  any  high  intellectual 
education  for  women. 

While  the  author  claims  to  use  the  term  edu- 
cation only  in  its  broadest  sense  as  "  the  draw- 
ing out  and  development  of  every  part  of  the 
system,"  including  necessarily  the  whole  manner 
of  life  physical  and  psychical  during  the  educa- 
tional period,  it  will  be  seen  that  he  lays  stress 
only  upon  the  physical  education  of  girls,  and 
upon  their  physical  education  only  as  it  is  con- 
nected with  the  duties  of  maternity.  Nowhere 
does  he  hold  out  to  the  girls  the  promise  that, 
if  they  will  carefully  obey  his  injunctions  dur- 
ing the  critical  period  of  their  lives,  they  can 
with  safety,  and  may  with  propriety,  seek  a 
higher  mental  culture.  Nowhere  does  he  urge 


Il6  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

them  finally  to  demand  the  highest  mental  cul- 
ture, as  he  insists  that  they  shall  have  the  high- 
est physical  culture,  as  their  birthright. 

Moreover,  that  regimen  which  precludes  the 
regular  attendance  of  girls  upon  school,  between 
the  ages  of  fourteen  and  nineteen,  virtually  robs 
them  of  any  extended  course  of  study,  since  be- 
fore the  end  of  that  period  their  so-called  duties 
to  society  are  thrust  upon  them. 

Is  it  fair,  in  contrasting  the  ruddy  cheeks  and 
vigor  of  the  English  girl  with  the  pallor  and  weak- 
ness of  the  American  girl,  to  attribute  the  latter 
largely  to  the  educational  methods  of  our  schools, 
and  to  credit  nothing  of  the  former  to  the  simple 
domestic  life  of  the  English  girl  ? 

Let  us  "  emphasize  and  reiterate  until  it  is 
heeded  "  Dr.  Clarke's  statement  that  "jwpman's 
neglect  of  her  own  organization  adds  to  the 
number  of  her  many  weaknesses,  and  intensifies 
their  power."  Let  us  reflect  awhile  before  we 
accept  his  statement  that  "the  educational 
methods  of  our  schools  are,  to  a  large  extent, 
the  causes  of  the  thousand  ills  that  beset  Amer- 
ican women." 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  1 1/ 

"Girls  of  bloodless  skins  and  intellectual 
faces,"  he  says,  "  may  be  seen  any  day,  by  those 
who  desire  the  spectacle,  among  the  scholars  of 
our  high  and  normal  schools  ;  faces  that  crown, 
and  skins  that  cover,  curving  spines  which  should 
be  straight,  and  neuralgic  nerves  that  should 
know  no  pain.  ...  A  training  that  yields  this 
result  is  neither  fair  to  the  girls  nor  to  the 
race." 

Are  bloodless  female  faces  to  be  found  only 
among  the  scholars  of  our  high  and  normal 
schools  ? 

When  found  there,  what  effort  has  Dr.  Clarke 
made  to  ascertain  how  much  of  their  bloodless- 
ness  is  due  to  brain  labor  ?  Does  he  know  any 
thing  of  the  home  life  of  these  girls  ?  Is  it  not 
just  possible  that  they  may  have  been  defrauded 
of  their  childhood,  —  that  in  what  is  technically 
and  prettily  called  helping  their  mothers,  lifting 
and  carrying  baby,  &c.,  their  poor  curved  spines 
may  have  got  a  -twist  long  before  they  had  won 
admission  to  the  high  school  ? 

Are  there  no  bloodless  faces  among  the  sew- 


Il8  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

ing  girls  who  do  not  stand  at  their  work,  whose 
work  is  neither  brain-work  nor  severe  manual 
labor,  but  that  most  often  quoted  to  us  as  the 
most  suitable  feminine  occupation  ? 

"  The  number  of  these  graduates  who  have 
been  permanently  disabled,  to  a  greater  or  less 
degree,  by  these  causes,  is  so  great  as  to  excite 
the  greatest  alarm,"  says  Dr.  Clarke.  Will  he 
give  us  the  exact  number,  so  that  we  need  not 
underrate  or  overrate  the  danger  ?  and,  if  it  can 
be  proved  that  two  out  of  every  five  of  these 
wrecks  to  which  he  sadly  points,  were  stranded 
on  another  shore  than  that  of  a  sustained  course 
of  mental  work,  it  will  tend  to  quiet  the  alarm. 

I  do  not  wish  to  put  out  of  sight  the  doctor's 
explicit  declaration  that  "our  school  methods 
are  not  the  sole  causes  of  female  weakness." 
He  admits  that  "an  immense  loss  of  female 
power  may  be  fairly  charged  "  to  certain  delin- 
quencies of  dress  and  diet ;  yet  he  as  distinctly 
adds  that,  "  after  the  amplest  allowance  for 
these,  there  remains  a  large  margin  of  disease 
unaccounted  for  ;  "  that  "  the  grievous  maladies 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  1 19 

that  torture  a  woman's  earthly  existence  are 
indirectly  affected  by  food,  clothes,  and  exer- 
cise ;  they  are  directly  and  largely  affected  by 
the  methods  of  education  in  our  schools."  Fur- 
thermore, he  makes  no  demand  that  girls  shall 
be  as  carefully  protected  from  physical  strain 
and  from  mental  excitement  in  their  social  life 
at  critical  periods  as  he  does  that  they  shall  be 
protected  from  the  excitements  of  study.  A 
paper  that,  after  claiming  to  treat  upon  educa- 
tion as  "  including  the  whole  manner  of  life," 
declares  the  discussion  of  dress  and  similar 
causes  of  female  weakness  is  not  within  its 
scope  ;  that  mentions  these  casually  as  indirect 
causes,  and  is  silent  concerning  the  social  ex- 
citements of  girls,  which  every  teacher  feels  to 
be  a  fruitful  source  of  disease,  directing  its 
arguments  mainly  against  their  mental  training, 
—  does  not  seem  to  me  to  be  written  wholly  in 
the  interest  of  the  girls.  The  writer  leaves  the 
impression,  and  he  means  to  leave  the  impres- 
sion, that  the  regimen  of  the  schools,  if  not  the 
sole  cause,  is  the  prime  and  direct  cause  of  the 


120  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

ill-health  of  American  women.  When  he  gives 
us  statistics  showing  that  the  girls  injured  by 
co-education  or  by  separate  identical  education 
outnumber  the  girls  diseased  by  excessive  muscle 
work,  excessive  mental  idleness,  or  excessive 
social  dissipation,  it  will  not  be  necessary  for 
him  to  plead  the  poverty  of  Harvard  College  in 
support  of  his  theory. 

By  his  logic  the  girls  in  fashionable  private 
schools,  where  the  discipline  is  supposed  to  be 
more  lax,  the  course  of  study  more  flexible,  and 
the  standard  lower,  should  have  better  health 
than  the  girls  in  the  public  schools.  Is  it  true 
that  they  have  ? 

Teachers  of  fashionable  private  schools  for 
girls  in  Boston  to-day  know  that  their  pupils,  so 
far  from  studying  harder  than  they  themselves 
did  twenty-five  years  ago,  study  less.  The  hours 
of  the  school  session  are  fewer,  and  much  less 
time  is  granted  for  study  out  of  school.  They 
know,  too,  that  the  absences  excused  by  sick- 
ness are  far  in  excess  of  those  of  their  own 
school-days.  Looking,  therefore,  for  some  other 


SEX  AND   EDUCA  TION.  1 2 1 

cause  than  increased  brain-work,  for  this  de- 
generacy in  the  health  of  girls,  they  easily  find 
it  in  the  increased  luxury  and  irregularity  of 
their  home  life. 

Teachers  of  long  experience  testify  that  the 
health  of  studious  girls  is  better  than  that  of  the 
lazy  ones,  because  their  minds  are  occupied  hap- 
pily, and  being  also  regularly  occupied  acquire 
a  habit  of  concentration  that  is  stability  and 
strength  for  mind  and  body.  The  involuntary 
testimony  of  many  a  school-girl  goes  far  to  con- 
firm this. 

Sadder  even  than  the  bloodless  skin  and  in- 
tellectual face  of  the  normal-school  girl  is  the 
not  uncommon  spectacle  of  the  bloodless  skin 
and  unintellectual  face  of  the  girl  in  our  fash- 
ionable private  schools,  whose  mind  has  become 
so  enervated  by  parental  indulgence,  so  demoral- 
ized by  constant  social  excitement,  that,  to  use 
her  own  words,  "  the  sight  of  a  book  makes  her 
head  ache." 

If  we  could  make  it  impossible  for  little  girls 
of  eight  to  solemnize  paper-doll  weddings,  from 
6 


122  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

which  the  precocious  guests,  after  refreshing 
themselves  with  lobster  salad  and  candies,  roll 
home  in  their  carriages  at  ten  at  night ;  if  we 
could  prevent  the  participation  of  their  older 
sisters  in  private  theatricals  and  the  German, 
during  the  regular  school-work  of  the  year  ;  if 
the  education  of  girls  could  be  at  least  so  far 
identical  with  that  of  boys  that  we  could  oppose 
common  sense  and  physiological  reasons  to  that 
absurd  dictum  of  society  which  now  thrusts  girls 
of  eighteen  out  of  the  school-room  and  into  the 
matrimonial  market,  while  their  brothers  of  the 
same  age  are  considered  as  mere  lads  and  just 
beginning  their  education  ;  if  we  could  take  care 
that  they  are  not  overburdened  with  domestic 
responsibility  as  their  brothers  never  are,  and, 
instead  of  restricting  their  regular  routine  of 
school-work  to  the  period  between  eight  and 
eighteen,  could  extend  it  to  the  age  of  twenty- 
four,  like  that  of  their  college  brothers  who  study 
a  profession,  —  the  girls  .would  have  the  fair 
chance  which  they  now  lack,  both  for  physical 
and  mental  development. 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  \  23 

Meantime  let  the  well  girls,  and  there  are 
hundreds  of  them,  though  of  course  not  within 
the  Doctor's  range  of  vision,  aim  for  the  highest 
intellectual  culture,  not  deterred  by  the  fear  of 
being  stigmatized  as  agates. 

Can  any  woman  read  this  book  without  feeling 
depressed,  —  crushed  by  this  cosmic  law  of  peri- 
odicity which  is  to  exempt  her  from  nothing,  but 
only  to  debar  her  from  a  higher  education  ?  For 
the  Doctor  declares  that  "female  operatives  of 
all  sorts  are  likely  to  suffer  less,  and  actually  do 
suffer  less,  from  persistent  work  than  female  stu- 
dents, .  .  .  because  the  former  work  their  brains 
less."  The  regimen  prescribed  by  the  Doctor  has 
so  few  attractions,  the  reward  he  offers  is  so 
paltry.  We  are  to  remember  that  "  the  glory  of 
the  lily  is  one,  and  the  glory  of  the  oak  another." 
If  we  "pass  middle  life  without  the  symmetry 
and  development  that  maternity  gives,"  we  are 
taunted  with  the  "  hermaphroditic  condition  that 
sometimes  accompanies  spinsterism."  We  are 
not  allowed  to  believe,  with  Alger,  that  "the 
qualities  of  our  soul  and  the  fruitions  of  our  life 


124  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

may  be  perfected  in  spite  of  the  relative  mutila- 
tion in  our  lot."  We  are  to  "give  girls  a  fair 
chance  for  physical  development  at  school,  and 
they  will  be  able  in  after  life,  with  reasonable 
care  of  themselves,  to  answer  the  demands  made 
upon  them."  That  is  the  summary. 

Whether  intentionally  or  not,  this  book  pan- 
ders to  that  sentiment  of  fashionable  society 
that  declares  it  unnecessary  for  girls  to  know 
any  thing  but  to  make  themselves  attractive  ;  and, 
what  is  still  more  to  be  regretted,  it  will  tend  to 
increase  the  selfishness  and  the  imaginary  in- 
validism  so  prevalent  among  girls  and  women 
who  have  nothing  better  in  life  to  do  than  to 
think  of  themselves. 

The  "  wisely  anxious  "  mothers  do  not  need  it ; 
and  the  injudicious  mothers,  who  wish  to  make 
the  schools  responsible  for  their  own  constant 
violation  of  the  simplest  hygienic  laws  in  the 
management  of  their  daughters,  confirmed  in 
their  weakness  by  Dr.  Clarke's  leniency  towards 
their  social  sins,  will  eagerly  seize  upon  it  as  a 
weapon  of  attack. 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  1 2$ 

It  is  easy  enough  to  make  vague  and  arbitrary 
assertions,  and  to  point  them  with  cruel  gibes, — 
far  easier  than  to  prove  them  false.  It  is  easy 
enough  to  meet  sneer  with  sneer,  and  to  animad- 
vert upon  such  assertions  with  a  certain  piquancy. 
But  neither  the  assertion  nor  the  animadversion 
amounts  to  any  thing  without  facts  to  support 
it. 

A  physician  of  such  standing  and  authority  in 
the  community  that  we  are  compelled  to  listen 
to  him  has  made  assertions  which  he  has  not 
yet  supported  by  statistics.  It  behooves  the 
earnest  women,  especially  the  faithful  teachers, 
to  satisfy  themselves  at  least  whether  these  as- 
sertions can  be  supported,  —  in  order,  if  they  can 
be,  to  correct  what  is  wrong  in  their  present 
methods,  and,  if  they  cannot  be,  to  do  their  part 
towards  removing  a  false  impression. 


126  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


VII. 

BY  ELIZABETH   STUART   PHELPS. 

THE  only  really  serious  thing  about  Dr.  Clarke's 
book  is  the  confusion  of  the  author's  ideas  as  to 
the  precise  defining  line  between  a  work  adapted 
to  popular  instruction  and  a  medical  treatise. 
An  author  who  forgets  in  the  drawing-room  and 
at  the  fireside  that  he  is  not  in  the  lecture-room 
of  the  medical  school,  has  put  himself  beyond 
the  reach  of  knowing  the  real  effect  produced 
by  him  upon  either  the  drawing-room  or  the  fire- 
side. He  may  have  done  so  with  the  deliberate 
intention  of  a  theorist  who  does  not  desire  to  be 
answered ;  he  may  have  done  so  with  the  clear 
conscience  of  a  zealot  who  desires  only  to  do 
what  presents  itself  to  him  as  his  duty.  He  has 
undoubtedly  done  so,  at  least,  with  motives  which 
it  were  indelicate  to  call  indelicate,  whatever  else 
might  be  said  of  them  ;  but,  all  the  same,  he  has 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  12? 

put  himself  beyond  this  reach.  From  the  medi- 
cal lecture-room  alone  can  he  be  answered.  Only 
a  physician  can  reply  to  "  Sex  in  Education." 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that,  among  the  physicians 
whose  professional  rank  may  entitle  them  to  a 
hearing  as  broad  as  Dr.  Clarke's,  some  one  who 
joins  issue  with  him  upon  his  principal  physio- 
logical theory,  may  find  the  leisure  to  remind  us 
what  a  blessed  fact  it  is  that  doctors  always  dis- 
agree. Without  the  least  desire  to  undervalue 
either  the  culture  or  the  skill  of  the  man  from 
whom  we  differ,  a  little  inquiry  into  the  effect 
produced  upon  brother  and  sister  physicians  by 
his  essay  will  reveal  the  fact  that  its  author  is  not 
without  sufficiently  important  opponents.  "  Sex 
in  Education  "  having  once  been  written,  another 
essay,  equally  to  the  point,  if  a  little  more  regard- 
ful of  the  old-fashioned  prejudices  of  non-medi- 
cal society,  should  be  written  to  mate  it. 

Meanwhile  it  remains  possible  for  any  of  us 
to  say,  in  deprecation  of  the  notion  of  woman- 
hood advanced  by  Dr.  Clarke,  two  things. 

i.  The    physician   is   not  the   person   whose 


128  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

judgment  upon  a  matter  involving  the  welfare 
of  women  can  possibly  be  final.  His  testimony, 
worth  what  it  may  be  worth,  should  seek  and  fall 
into  its  proper  place  in  the  physical  aspects  of 
such  a  question ;  but  it  shall  stay  in  its  place. 
It  is  but  a  link  in  a  chain.  It  is  only  a  tint  in  a 
kaleidoscope.  A  question  so  intricate  and  shift- 
ing as  that  which  involves  the  exact  position  of 
woman  in  the  economy  of  a  cursed  world  is  not  to 
be  settled  by  the  most  intimate  acquaintance  with 
the  proximate  principles  of  the  human  frame,  with 
the  proportions  of  the  gray  and  white  matter  in  the 
brain,  or  with  the  transitional  character  of  the 
tissues  and  the  exquisite  machinery  of  the  viscera. 
The  psychologist  has  yet  his  word  to  say.  The 
theologian  has  a  reason  to  be  heard.  The  politi- 
cal economist  might  also  add  to  experience  knowl- 
edge. The  woman  who  is  physically  and  intel- 
lectually a  living  denial  of  every  premise  and  of 
every  conclusion  which  Dr.  Clarke  has  advanced, 
has  yet  a  right  to  an  audience.  Nor  is  he  even 
the  man  whose  judgment  as  to  the  health  of 
women  can  be  symmetrical.  No  clinical  opinion, 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

it  will  be  remembered,  bearing  against  the  phys- 
ical vigor  of  any^class  of  people,  is  or^  can  be  a 
complete  one.  The  physician  knows  sick  women 
almost  only.  Well  women  keep  away  from  him, 
and  thank  Heaven.  If  there  be  any  well  women 
he  is  always  in  doubt.  Thousands  of  women 
will  read  that  they  are  prevented  by  Nature's 
eternal  and  irresistible  laws  from  all  sustained 
activity  of  brain  or  body,  but  principally  of  brain, 

with   much   the   same   emotion  with  which  we 

•. 

might  read  a  fiat  gone  forth  from  the  Royal  Col- 
lege of  Surgeons  in  London,  that  Americans 
could  not  eat  roast  beef,  since,  their  researches 
into  morbid  American  anatomy  had  developed 
the  fact  that  Americans  had  died  of  eating  roast 
beef,'  as  well  as  a  peculiar  structure  of  the  Ameri- 
can stomach,  to  which  roast  beef  was  poisonously 
adapted.  Thousands  of  women  will  not  believe 
what  the  author  of  "  Sex  in  Education "  tells 
them,  simply  because  they  know  better.  Their 
own  unlearned  experience  stands  to  them  in 
refutation  of  his  learned  statements.  They  will 
give  him  theory  for  theory.  They  can  pile  up 
6*  i 


130  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

for  him  illustration  on  illustration.  Statistics 
they  have  none  ;  but  no  statistics  has  he.  They 
and  the  Doctor  are  met  on  fair  fight. 

Many  a  woman  who  stands  at  the  factory  loom 
eleven  hours  and  a  half  a  day,  from  year's  end  to 
year's  end,  from  the  age  of  eight  to  the  age  of 
forty-eight,  knows  better  than  he  tells  her.  Every 
lady  lecturer  in  the  land,  who  unites  the  most 
exhausting  kind  of  brain  and  body  labor  in  her 
own  experience,  day  and  night  after  day  and 
night,  for  the  half  of  every  year,  and  unites  it 
in  defiance  of  Dr.  Clarke's  prognostications, 
knows  better.  Every  healthy  woman  physician 
knows  better ;  and  it  is  only  the  woman  physi- 
cian, after  all,  whose  judgment  can  ever  approach 
the  ultimate  uses  of  the  physicist's  testimony  to 
these  questions. 

It  should  be  said  :  2.  Almost  every  fact  brought 
forward  by  Dr.  Clarke  goes  to  illustrate  the  exact 
opposite  of  his  almost  every  conclusion  in  respect 
to  the  effect  of  mental  labor  upon  the  female 
physique.  With  the  serene,  not  to  say  dogmatic 
conviction  of  the  physician  whose  own  patients 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  131 

represent  the  world  to  him,  he  has  copied  for  us 
from  his  note-books  a  series  of  cases  exemplify- 
ing the  remarkable  unanimity  with  which  girls, 
after  leaving  school,  break  down  in  health.  Over- 
looking the  blunder  which  he  made  about  the 
student  from  Vassar  College,  which  has  been  so 
carefully  pointed  out  by  Colonel  Higginson  (I 
refer  to  Dr.  Clarke's  implicit  and  unhesitating 
acceptance  and  publication  of  statements  made 
by  the  student,  which  the  faculty  of  the  college 
have  since  altogether  denied) ;  not  pausing  to  dis- 
cuss the  spirit  which  grasps  at  uninvestigated 
testimony  like  this,  —  run  the  eye  over  his  illus- 
trations, and  what  have  we  ? 

With  an  affluent  accompaniment  of  office  detail 
so  evidently  necessary  to  the  public  discussion  of 
an  educational  topic,  and  so  unlikely  to  attract  a 
purely  irrelevant  and  unworthy  attention  to  the 
circulation  of  the  essay  that  one  cannot  fail  to 
note  the  author's  generosity  in  this  particular,  he 
calls  our  consideration  to  his  list  of  cases,  argu* 
ing  detachedly,  by  the  way,  and  ingeniously  con- 
structing for  our  benefit  very  much  such  a 
syllogism  as  this. 


132  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

Sumption.  —  All  women  ought  to  be  incapable 
of  sustained  activity. 

Subsumption.  —  Some  women  whom  I  have 
known  are  incapable  of  sustained  activity.  Miss 
X.  became  an  invalid  soon  after  leaving  school. 
Miss  Y.  was  injured  by  gymnastic  exercises,  fell 
under  my  care,  and  will  never  be  well.  Miss  Z. 
became  an  invalid  soon  after  leaving  school,  and 
being  for  some  time  under  my  treatment  was 
sent  to  an  insane  asylum. 

Therefore, 

Conclusion :  All  women  are  incapable  of  sus- 
tained activity,  but  proved  especially  incapable  of 
sustained  brain  activity  ;  and,  since  it  would  cost 
Harvard  College  several  millions  of  dollars  to 
admit  them,  co-education  is  a  chimera,  and  old 
maids  a  monstrosity  at  which  physicians  may 
sneer,  and  by  which  young  women  should  take 
warning. 

Or,  to  put  it  in  another  form,  more  compactly, 

As  long  as  girls  are  in  school  they  are  (with 
exceptions  so  rare  that  I  have  had  great  difficulty 
in  finding  them)  in  excellent  health. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

When  girls  leave  school,  they  fall  sick. 

Therefore  it  is  sustained  study  which  injure 
girls. 

Here,  now,  is  the  point  of  fair  dispute.  Why 
do  girls  so  often  become  invalids  within  a  few 
years  after  leaving  school  ?  The  fact  is  a  famil- 
iar one.  We  needed  no  Dr.  Clarke  come  from 
their  graves  to  tell  us  this.  We  are  well  accus- 
tomed to  the  sight  of  a  fresh  young  girl,  a  close 
student,  a  fine  achiever,  "  sustained "  in  mental 
application,  and  as  healthy  in  body  as  she  is 
vigorous  and  aspiring  in  brain,  sinking,  after  a 
period  of  out-of-school  life,  into  an  aching,  ailing, 
moping  creature,  aimless  in  the  spirit  and  useless 
in  the  flesh  for  any  of  life's  higher  purposes, 
with  which  her  young  soul  was  filled  and  fired 
a  little  while  ago. 

"  You  may  be  well  enough  now.  Wait  till 
you  are  twenty  four  or  five.  That  is  the  age 
when  girls  break  down."  This  is  the  doleful 
prophecy  of  friends  and  physicians  cast  cold  on 
the  warm  hopes  of  our  hard-working,  ambitious 
girls.  "  It  is  because  you  keep  late  hours,  dance 


134  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

too  much,  eat  indigestible  food,  or  exercise  too 
little,"  says  the  hygienist  "  It  is  because  you 
wear  corsets,  long  skirts,  and  chignons,"  says 
the  dress  reformer.  "  It  is  because  you  are  a 
woman.  Here  is  a  mystery  !  "  says  the  dunce. 
"  It  is  because  you  study  too  much,"  says  Dr. 
Clarke. 

Who  of  us  has  yet  suggested  and  enforced  the 
suggestion  of  another  reason  more  simple  and 
comprehensive  than  any  of  these,  —  more  prob- 
able, perhaps,  than  any  which  could  be  found 
outside  of  the  effects  of  female  dress  ? 

Women  sick  because  they  study  ?  Does  it 
not  look  a  little  more  as  if  women  were  sick 
because  they  stopped  studying  ? 

Worn  out  by  intellectual  activity  ? 

Let  us  suppose  that  they  might  be  exhausted 
by  the  change  from  intellectual  activity  to  in- 
tellectual inanition.  Made  invalids  because  they 
go  to  school  from  fourteen  to  eighteen  ?  Let  us 
conceive  that  they  might  be  made  invalids  be- 
cause they  left  school  at  eighteen  !  Let  us  draw 
upon  our  imagination  to  the  extent  of  inquiring 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  135 

whether  the  nineteenth-century  girl  —  intense, 
sensitive,  and  developing,  like  her  age,  nervously 
and  fast  —  might  not  be  made  an  invalid  by  the 
plunge  from  the  "  healing  influences  "  of  system- 
atic brain  exertion  to  the  broken,  jagged  life 
which  awaits  a  girl  whose  "education  is  com- 
pleted." Made  an  invalid  by  exchanging  the 
wholesome  pursuit  of  sufficient  and  worthy  aims 
for  the  unrelieved  routine  of  a  dependent  domes- 
tic life,  from  which  all  aim  has  departed,  or  for 

» 

the  whirl  of  false  excitements  and  falser  contents 
which  she  calls  society.  Made  an  invalid  by  the 
abrupt  slide  from  "  thinking,"  as  poor  Lamb  had 
it,  "  that  life  was  going  to  be  something,"  to  the 
discovery  that  it  has  "  unaccountably  fallen  from 
her  before  its  time."  Made  an  invalid  by  the 
sad  and  subtle  process  by  which  a  girl  is  first 
inspired  to  the  ideal  of  a  life  in  which  her  per- 
sonal culture  has  as  honest  and  honorable  a  part 
of  her  regard  as  (and  as  a  part  of)  her  personal 
usefulness  ;  and  then  is  left  to  find  out  that  per- 
sonal culture  substantially  stopped  for  her  when 
she  tied  the  ribbon  of  her  seminary  diploma. 


136  SEX  A ND   ED  UCA  TION. 

Made  an  invalid  by  the  prejudice  that  deprives 
her  of  the  stimulus  which  every  human  being 
needs  and  finds  in  the  pursuit  of  some  one 
especial  avocation,  and  confines  that  avocation 
for  her  to  a  marriage  which  she  may  never 
effect,  and  which  may  never  help  the  matter  if 
she  does.  Made  an  invalid  by  the  change  from 
doing  something  to  doing  nothing.  Made  an 
invalid  by  the  difference  between  being  happy 
and  being  miserable.  Made  an  invalid,  in  short, 
for  just  the  reasons  (in  whatever  manner,  the 
manner  being  a  secondary  point)  why  a  man 
would  be  made  an  invalid  if  subjected  to  the 
woman's  life  when  the  woman's  education  is 
over.  That  wretched,  mistaken  life,  that  ner- 
vous, emotive,  aimless,  and  exhausting  life  which 
women  assume  at  the  end  of  their  school  career 
would  have  killed  Dr.  Clarke,  had  it  been  his 
lot,  quite  too  soon  for  his  years  and  experience 
to  have  matured  into  the  writing  of  "  Sex  in 
Education." 

Girls  know  what  I  mean.     Women  who  work 
for  women  have  some  chance  to  read  the  mind 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  137 

of  women  on  such  points.  We  could  produce 
our  own  note-book  over  against  the  physician's, 
and  the  contents  of  it  would  be  pitiful  to  see. 

The  sense  of  perplexed  disappointment,  of 
baffled  intelligence,  of  unoccupied  powers,  of 
blunted  aspirations,  which  run  through  the  con- 
fidences of  girls  "left  school,"  is  enough  to 
create  any  illness  which  nervous  wear  and 
misery  can  create.  And  the  physician  should 
be  the  first  man  to  recognize  this  fact,  —  not  the 
man  to  ignore  or  discredit  it ;  not  the  man  to 
use  his  professional  culture  to  the  neglect  of 
any  obvious  appeal  to  his  professional  candor  ; 
not  the  man  to  veil  within  a  few  slippery  flat- 
teries a  wilful  ignorance  or  an  unmanly  sneer. 

Admitting  what  must  be  in  justice  said  of 
"  Sex  in  Education,"  —  that  its  author's  pro- 
fessional status  demanded  for  his  opinions,  if 
expressed  in  the  proper  way  and  in  the  proper 
places,  at  least  an  intelligent  hearing ;  and 
that  he  has  called  attention  to  some  evils  in  the 
training  of  very  young  girls  which  require, 
whether  by  his  means  or  by  some  other,  a 


133  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

remedy  ;  and  that  he  has  made  a  sincere  en- 
deavor to  point  out  these  real  and  other  imagi- 
nary evils  in  a  manner  good,  at  least  in  his  own 
eyes,  —  the  sneer  remains.1  By  it  women  will 
remember  him  when  the  work  which  he  under- 
took to  do  shall  be  long  forgotten.  Through  it 
the  whole  character  of  that  work  is  vitiated  and 
its  influence  marred.  For  it  we  may  yet  be 
grateful,  after  all. 

1  Any  reader  of  the  essay  will  recall  its  flings  at  women 
who,  either  from  subjective  preference  or  objective  pressure, 
are  debarred  from  marriage  and  maternity.  These  flings  are 
too  disagreeable  for  pleasant  quotation. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  139 


VIII. 

DR.  CLARKE'S  book  on  '*  Sex  in  Education " 
should  be  read  deliberately,  thoughtfully,  and  in 
a  spirit  of  fairness,  which  seeks  only  to  know 
the  real  facts  in  the  matter,  and  not  to  find 
arguments  for  or  against  any  special  theory, 
system,  or  hobby.  Dr.  Clarke  is  an  eminent 
physician.  All  forms  of  disease  are  not  only 
familiar  to  him,  but  are  forced  upon  his  atten- 
tion :  of  course  he  sees  the  dark  side  of  life, 
and  judges  accordingly.  His  picture  of  the 
condition  of  women  is  a  terrible  one,  calculated 
to  excite  deep  anxiety  in  parents,  and  in  young 
women  themselves :  he  sees  in  the  future,  if  the 
present  system  of  education  is  continued,  only 
increasing  invalidism,  partial  development,  de- 
formity, and  the  eventual  failure  of  the  Ameri- 
can race.  This  alarming  condition  of  affairs  he 


140  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

attributes  to  various  causes ;  and  among  the 
most  powerful  of  these  causes  he  reckons  the 
common  system  of  continuous  education  for  girls. 
He  calls  it  the  boy's  method,  and  means  by  it 
not  any  special  curriculum  of  study,  or  any  share 
in  out-of-doors  masculine  plays  or  employments, 
but  simply  regular  study  for  five  or  six  days  of 
every  week.  This,  he  thinks,  is  so  grave  an  error, 
so  absolutely  criminal  a  course,  that  he  has  given 
to  the  world  this  book  of  warning,  to  stay,  if  he 
can,  this  evil ;  to  save,  if  he  can,  American  girls, 
to  enable  them  to  become  mothers  ;  for,  he  says, 
"  if  these  causes  of  evil  —  persistent  education 
chief  among  them  —  should  continue  for  the 
next  half  century,  and  increase  in  the  same  ratio 
as  they  have  for  the  last  fifty  years,  it  requires 
no  prophet  to  foretell  that  the  wives  who  are  to 
be  mothers  in  our  republic  must  be  drawn  from 
transatlantic  homes.  The  sons  of  the  New 
World  will  have  to  react,  on  a  magnificent 
scale,  the  old  story  of  unwived  Rome  and  the 
Sabines." 

It  is  not  education  for  women  to  which  Dr. 


•SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  1 4 1 

Clarke  objects.  He  repeats  emphatically  that 
they  have  a  right  to  the  best  education  and  the 
finest  culture.  He  does  not  doubt  their  intellect- 
ual ability ;  but  the  essential  thing  in  a  good 
education  is  complete  development,  so  that 
"  boys  may  become  men,  and  girls  women,  and 
both  have  a  fair  chance  to  do  and  become  their 
best."  Dr.  Clarke's  point  is  that  the  sustained 
regularity  of  study  which  benefits  a  boy  inevita- 
bly harms  a  girl,  prevents  her  from  doing  or  be- 
coming her  best,  and  in  a  frightfully  large  pro- 
portion of  cases  actually  ruins  her  health,  and 
makes  it  impossible  for  her  to  nourish,  and  too 
often  impossible  for  her  to  bear,  children.  This 
danger  he  discusses  fully,  and,  as  he  says,  with 
great  plainness  of  speech,  and  without  ambiguity 
of  language  or  euphemism  of  expression.  The 
peril  seems  to  him  imminent,  and  he  cries  aloud 
from  his  watch-tower  of  science  and  experience, 
and  his  cry  will  be  heard  and  heeded  by  thou- 
sands. But  there  are  other  cries  to  be  heard  and 
heeded  ;  there  are  other  watchmen  who  do  not 
sleep  at  their  posts,  and  who  see  brighter  scenes 


142  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

and  more  hopeful  signs,  —  watchmen  who  do  not 
disregard  the  enemy,  but  who  see  him  and  the 
causes  of  his  strength  from  another  point  of 
view. 

The  defects  in  the  present  system  of  education 
are  so  great  that  it  is  no  wonder  physicians  can 
hardly  find  words  strong  enough  for  denuncia- 
tion of  them,  —  especially  great  in  the  education 
of  girls.  Children  of  both  sexes  have  too  many 
studies  ;  they  are  crowded  and  hurried  ;  they  do 
very  little  really  hard  brain-work,  but  their  brains 
are  bewildered  ;  they  have  a  sort  of  mental  indi- 
gestion all  the  time  ;  and  this  kind  of  crowding 
and  driving  is  exciting  and  exhausting  to  the 
nerves,  and  injurious  to  every  portion  of  the 
organism.  Boys  have  some  offset  to  it:  they 
have  an  easy  dress,  short  hair,  and  can  exercise 
freely  out  of  schools  ;  but  that  even  their  train- 
ing is  not  the  best  is  shown  by  the  innumerable 
invalids,  imbeciles,  and  insane  among  men.  With 
girls,  especially  city  girls,  the  matter  is  worse. 
They  cannot  race  and  play  and  frolic  on  the 
common  or  in  the  streets  ;  they  wear  tight  boots, 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  143 

burdensome  clothes,  not  tight  but  cumbersome 
masses  of  their  own  or  false  hair  on  the  head, 
that  should  be  cool  and  free  ;  they  eat  unwhole- 
some food  ;  dance  at  hot  parties  ;  saunter  along 
the  pavements,  with  arms  a  la  mode;  go  to  danc- 
ing school  and  skating  parties  without  the  faint- 
est regard  to  physiology  or  to  the  plain  rules  of 
health ;  have  music  lessons  and  masters  ;  and  in 
too  many  cases  lead  a  life  of  reckless  waste  that  it 
makes  a  grown  person  breathless  to  think  of.  No 
wonder  they  break  down,  no  wonder  they  have  all 
those  miserable  polysyllabic  diseases  that  decently 
trained  women  never  heard  of ;  but  we  believe 
that  the  class  who  have  these  diseases  because  of 
"  sustained  regularity "  in  study  is  so  small  that 
it  should  hardly  be  reckoned  in  the  account,  but 
should  be  treated  as  exceptional,  like  the  blind  or 
the  physically  deformed.  It  is  almost  impossible 
for  even  a  physician  to  discover  in  the  case  of 
young  invalids  how  much  really  hard  and  inju- 
rious study  has  been  done.  The  imprudences, 
wilful  or  ignorant,  of  girls,  are  innumerable,  and 
only  when  driven  to  the  last  extreme  will  they 


144  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

confess  them.  If  the  evil  resulting  from  bad 
diet,  late  and  irregular  hours,  improper  clothing, 
exposure  to  cold  and  dampness,  hereditary  weak- 
ness, and  exciting  reading,  could  be  eliminated, 
we  believe  there  would  be  no  difficulty  whatever 
in  raising  a  generation  of  strong  and  noble  girls 
under  the  system  of  "  sustained  regularity "  of 
study. 

There  is  something  to  be  said  from  the  side  of 
health.  All  women  are  not  sick,  and  the  ex- 
perience of  health  teaches  that  girls  and  boys 
should  have  a  very  large  margin  for  repair  of 
waste  and  for  growth, — girls,  perhaps,  a  larger 
margin  than  boys,  although  we  are  by  no  means 
sure  of  that.  Nature  is  a  wise  worker,  and  dis- 
tributes the  repair  and  growth  wherever  it  is 
needed,  to  the  dual  organism  of  the  boy  or  to  the 
tripartite  one  of  the  girl.  With  simple,  healthful 
habits  of  life,  with  proper  diet,  abundant  sleep, 
plenty  of  sunshine  and  play,  and  moderate,  regu- 
lar study,  in  school  or  out,  girls,  unless  they  . 
inherited  some  disease,  would  stand  a  fair  chance 
for  health,  strength,  and  development  as  women. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  145 

Indeed,  we  believe  the  sustained  regularity  of 
moderate  study  to  be  better  for  the  health  of  the 
average  girl  than  any  periodicity  of  study.  Girls 
educated  in  this  way,  with  wise  regard  to  the 
general  principles  of  health,  are  not  likely  to 
indulge  in  what  Dr.  Clarke  calls  cerebral  pyro- 
technics at  school  examinations  ;  but  they  are 
likely  to  grow  up  intelligent  women,  with  good 
common  sense,  who,  if  fate  throws  them  into  the 
whirl  of  city  life,  will  set  their  faces  against  its 
overwhelming  excitements,  and  seek  peaceful 
hours  at  home  as  the  weight  and  balance-wheel 
of  life ;  and,  if  they  live  in  the  country,  make 
happy  homes  there.  Many  of  them  will  be,  as 
women  so  educated  now  are,  mothers  and  grand- 
mothers ;  some  will  probably  be  childless  wives, 
and  some  will  never  marry,  but  none  of  them 
will  ever  deserve  the  bitter  sneer  with  which  Dr. 
Clarke  speaks  of  torsos  and  of  the  "  hermaphro- 
ditic condition  that  sometimes  accompanies  spin- 
sterism." 

If  the  ruinous  work  of  women,  their  standing 
in  shops  and  at  desks,  could  be  stopped  ;  if  chil- 
7  J 


146  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

dren  between  ten  and  sixteen  were  not  allowed 
to  serve  in  shops ;  if  no  woman  under  twenty 
were  allowed  to  teach  in  a  public  school ;  if  girls 
were  taught  obedience  and  truth-telling,  and  if 
mothers  were  wisely  anxious, — that  is  Dr.  Clarke's 
expression,  and  goes  to  the  root  of  the  matter,  — 
wisely  anxious  about  their  daughters,  caring 
for  their  health  more  than  for  their  appearance, 
for  their  permanent  good  more  than  their  present 
indulgence,  looking  after  their  reading  and  their 
pleasures,  guarding  them  from  imprudence  and 
making  them  take  care  of  their  own  health,  there 
would  be  no  trouble  about  regular  study.  The 
same  causes  that  dry  up  the  youth  and  strength 
of  young  girls  break  down  older  ones,  —  constant 
excitement  and  no  real  rest ;  social  excitement 
at  parties ;  passionate  excitement  at  operas  and 
theatres  ;  emotional  excitement  over  highly 
wrought  novels  and  philanthropic  work ;  one 
following  close  on  the  other,  and  all  accompanied 
by  bodily  fatigue  and  endless  hurry.  It  is  a  sad 
life  to  look  at,  in  spite  of  the  seeming  beauty  of 
the  garments  of  art,  culture,  and  charity  which 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  147 

it  wears.  If  Dr.  Clarke's  warning  will  waken 
people  to  their  danger,  and  make  them  lead  sim- 
pler and  easier  lives  ;  if  he  can  make  them  fol- 
low the  plainest  rules  of  health  ;  if  he  can  do 
any  thing  toward  keeping  girls  girls,  instead 
of  having  them  forced,  when  they  are  hardly  in 
their  teens,  into  diminutive  fashionable  women, 
with  a  smattering  of  forty  studies  and  a  knowledge 
of  none, — he  will  be  indeed  a  Good  Physician, 
and  his  aim  will  be  won  without  taking  girls  out 
of  school  or  interfering  with  their  regular  work, 
without  even  discussing  the  question  of  co-edu- 
cation. .  .  . 

The  accounts  of  the  training  of  German  girls 
given  in  the  last  chapter  bear  out  these  views. 
To  be  sure,  most  of  the  German  girls  leave 
school  young,  at  about  fifteen,  and  have  lessons 
at  home.  We  know  nothing  of  the  regularity, 
strictness,  or  requirements  of  these  lessons  or 
lectures  ;  but  we  do  know  the  work  is  regular, 
and  not  periodical,  for  girls  in  average  health, 
and  the  health  is  taken  care  of.  There  is  an 
established  kind  of  tradition,  as  there  is  in  many 


148  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

families  in  this  country,  in  regard  to  the  regimen 
for  girls.  Cold  and  exposure  are  avoided  ;  school- 
girls never  ride  and  never  go  to  parties  ;  and,  even 
when  school-days  are  over,  girls  do  not  go  to 
parties  during  the  time  when  Dr.  Clarke  thinks 
they  ought  not  to  go  to  school.  Dr.  Hagen 
writes :  "  The  health  of  the  German  girls  is  com- 
monly good,  except  in  the  higher  classes  in  the 
great  capitals,  where  the  same  obnoxious  agencies 
are  to  be  found  in  Germany  as  in  the  whole  world. 
But  here  also  there  is  a  very  strong  exception,  or, 
better,  a  difference  between  America  and  Ger- 
many, as  German  girls  are  never  accustomed  to 
the  free  manners  and  modes  of  life  of  American 
girls.  As  a  rule,  in  Germany  the  "  mother  directs 
the  manner  of  living  of  the  daughter  entirely  T 
The  italics  are  ours.  Dr.  Clarke  adds  to  this 
that  "pleasant  recreation  for  children  of  both 
sexes,  and  abundance  of  it,  is  provided  for  them 
all  over  Germany,  —  is  regarded  as  necessity  for 
them,  —  is  made  a  part  of  their  daily  life  ;  but 
then  it  is  open  air,  oxygen-surrounding,  blood- 
making,  health-giving,  innocent  recreation,  —  not 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TfON.  149 

gas,  furnaces,  low  necks,  spinal  trails,  —  the  civil- 
ized representatives  of  caudal  appendages,  —  and 
late  hours." 

We  repeat  that  Dr.  Clarke  does  not  oppose 
the  education  of  women :  he  only  opposes  the 
present  method  of  education.  He  says  distinctly : 
Let  us  remember  that  physiology  confirms  the 
hope  of  the  race  by  asserting  that  the  loftiest 
heights  of  intellectual  and  spiritual  vision  and 
force  are  free  to  each  sex,  and  accessible  by  each  ; 
but  adds  that  each  must  climb  in  its  own  way, 
and  accept  its  own  limitations,  and,  when  this  is 
done,  promises  that  each  will  find  the  doing  of 
it  not  to  weaken  or  diminish,  but  to  develop 
power.  His  book  is  written  with  force  and 
with  genuine  earnestness  and  feeling,  is  full  of 
valuable  instruction,  and  is  both  useful  and  sug- 
gestive to  those  who  will  agree  with  the  author, 
—  to  those  who  oppose  him,  and  to  those  like 
ourselves  who  sympathize  fully  with  his  aim,  but 
who  think  that  he  has  laid  the  emphasis  of  blame 
wrongly.  —  Boston  Daily  Advertiser. 


ISO  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


IX. 

BY   M.    B.   JACKSON. 

IN  this  little  book,  which  has  attracted  much 
attention,  there  are  many  excellent  things ;  and 
we  thank  Dr.  Clarke  for  having  written  it,  not  so 
much  for  what  it  contains  as  for  the  attention  it 
has  drawn  to  the  subject  of  which  it  treats. 
Coming  as  it  does  from  a  physician,  who  stands 
so  high  in  the  profession,  and  who  is  so  much 
esteemed  in  social  life,  it  naturally  attracts  the 
attention  of  many  who  are  thinking  upon  the 
subject  of  co-education.  But  we  regret  to  find 
that  one  who  should  be  informed  of  the  views  of 
the  prominent  advocates  of  co-education  should 
permit  himself  to  talk  of  their  wishing  to  make 
women  as  nearly  as  possible  like  men,  and  of 
women  as  wishing  to  become  like  men,  and  de- 
spising those  differences  in  themselves  which  dis- 
tinguish the  sexes,  when  in  fact  these  are  the 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  1 5 1 

opprobriums  of  their  opponents  instead  of  argu- 
ments to  defeat  the  cause.  On  page  18  he  says  : 

"It  is  said  that  Elina  Carnaro,  the  accom- 
plished professor  of  six  languages,  whose  statue 
adorns  and  honors  Padua,  was  educated  like  a 
boy.  This  means  that  she  was  initiated  into  and 
mastered  the  studies  that  were  considered  to  be 
the  peculiar  dower  of  men.  It  does  not  mean 
that  her  life  was  a  man's  life,  her  way  of  study  a 
man's  way  of  study,  or  that  in  acquiring  six 
languages  she  ignored  her  own  organization." 

How  the  Doctor  got  this  interpretation  of 
what  is  meant  by  Elina  Carnaro's  being  edu- 
cated like  a  boy  he  does  not  inform  us,  but  no 
woman  would  have  thought  that  her  life  was 
a  man's  life,  her  way  of  study  a  man's  way  of 
study,  or  that  in  acquiring  six  languages  she 
would  ignore  her  own  organization.  What  wo- 
men are  now  struggling  for  is  not  to  be  like 
men,  not  to  get  their  education  by  the  same 
mental  processes  as  men,  but  to  have  the  same 
opportunities  to  use  in  a  woman's  way,  and  to 
make  the  most  of  them  in  the  methods  their 


152  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

own  intellect  dictates  ;  not  to  have  men  lay  out 
the  course  of  study  for  them,  and  oblige  them  to 
follow  their  direction,  instead  of  their  own  nat- 
ural methods.  They  desire  to  be  allowed  to 
choose  the  college  or  university  that  suits  their 
!  wishes,  and  to  enter  any  educational  institution 
as  freely  as  men  choose  and  enter  theirs.  Dr. 
Clarke  takes  it  for  granted  that,  if  boys  and  girls 
are  educated  together,  the  girls  must  follow  the 
boys'  method  of  getting  their  lessons,  must 
study  as  many  hours  as  the  boys,  but  must  have 
none  of  the  physical  exercises  and  plays  that  boys 
have  to  strengthen  their  muscles,  and,  by  draw- 
ing off  the  nerve  force  from  the  brain,  let  it  rest 
and  be  refreshed  in  the  same  degree  that  the 
boys'  brains  are.  He  ignores  the  fact  that  boys, 
too,  have  a  period  of  development,  and  often 
require  tender  care  during  that  period,  as  well  as 
girls.  While  boys  are  encouraged  to  be  out  of 
doors,  and  to  engage  in  active  sports,  without 
the  slightest  intimation  that  there  is  any  impro- 
priety in  it,  girls  are  constantly  checked  if  their 
inclination  leads  them  to  desire  active  out-of- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  ^3 

door  sports.  They  are  told  that  they  are  hoy- 
dens, that  it  is  not  proper  for  girls  to  play  tag, 
or  coast,  or  run  races,  or  to  engage  in  any  of  the 
activities  that  would  render  them  physically 
strong  ;  and  so  they,  having  much  more  sensi- 
bility and  more  love  of  admiration  than  boys, 
give  up  all  amusements  that  are  denounced  as 
unladylike,  and  take  to  crocheting  or  fancy 
needlework,  which  in  itself  is  sufficient  to  de- 
bilitate them,  and  take  the  color  from  their 
cheeks,  without  the  strain  of  study  imposed 
upon  them  in  the  schools. 

The  Doctor  takes  for  granted  that  women  can- 
not go  through  a  college  course  with  men  with- 
out overtaxing  their  brains,  and  then  goes  on  to 
show  what  a  train  of  evils  follows  overtaxing  the 
brain.  This  is  an  easy  way  to  manage  the  case, 
and  saves  the  trouble  of  proving  that  women 
would  be  injured,  and  their  nervous  systems 
broken  down,  by  allowing  them  freedom  to  pur- 
sue such  a  course  of  study  as  they  might  feel 
able  to  master.  It  is  really  surprising  to  see 
with  what  complacency  the  Doctor  maps  out  a 
7* 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

course  for  women,  assuming  that  he  is  a  better 
judge  of  what  they  can  bear  than  they  are  them- 
selves, and  assuming  that  if  allowed  to  decide 
for  themselves  what  they  could  bear  they  would 
destroy  themselves  by  excessive  study !  This  is 
not  exactly  consistent  with  his  admission  of  their 
intellectual  equality  with  men  ;  but  women  have 
been  long  accustomed  to  being  told  that  they 
are  the  intellectual  peers  of  men,  and,  in  the 
next  breath,  that  they  do  not  know  what  is  best 
for  them,  and  that  men  are  their  natural  protec- 
tors and  supporters,  and  that  they  should  defer 
all  matters  relating  to  their  welfare  to  the  better 
judgment  of  men,  who  will  take  all  the  trouble 
of  such  decisions  from  them  and  settle  such  ques- 
tions in  the  way  that  will  promote  their  great- 
est happiness  !  When  the  time  comes  that  men 
have  so  far  mastered  the  plan  of  the  universe  as 
to  perceive  that  the  Creator  has  endowed  each 
class  of  animals  with  its  own  peculiar  method  of 
defence,  and  capable  of  choosing  the  way  of  life 
most  in  harmony  with  its  nature,  and  that  man, 
the  highest  in  the  grade  of  created  beings,  is  also 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  155 

endowed  with  the  power  of  seeing  what  will  best 
conserve  his  interest,  and  that  he  has  not  made 
one-half  of  the  race  incapable  of  choosing  wisely, 
and  therefore  dependent  upon  the  other  half  for 
this  information  a  great  step  will  be  taken  in  the 
right  direction,  and  equal  freedom  of  action  being 
secured  by  the  removal  of  all  laws  and  customs 
that  limit  women  to  narrower  bounds  than  men 
will  give  an  opportunity  to  decide  the  question  of 
what  women  can  do  and  will  do,  when  allowed 
free  scope  for  all  their  powers. 

The  Doctor  talks  as  if  the  Creator  had  made 
man  so  perfectly  that,  without  any  special  care 
on  his  part,  his  whole  nature  would  naturally 
develop  into  a  perfect  and  healthy  human  being, 
prepared  to  fulfil  all  objects  of  his  creation  ;  but 
that  He  made  woman  so  imperfectly  that  her 
organism  would  not  naturally  develop  into  a  per- 
fectly healthy  woman,  fitted  to  fulfil  the  high 
objects  of  her  creation,  unless  men  took  charge 
of  her  and  directed  what  she  must  do  and  how 
she  must  live. 

Is  not  this  impugning  the  wisdom  of  the  Crea- 


156  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

tor  in  assuming  that  He  left  a  being  on  whom 
the  welfare  of  the  race  greatly  depends  to  the 
poor  care  of  erring  mortals,  instead  of  creating 
her  as  He  has  man,  so  that  she  would  naturally 
grow  into  a  perfect  woman  from  the  very  nature 
of  her  constitution  ?  We  take  no  issue  with  the 
Doctor  in  regard  to  the  host  of  ills  that  women 
are  suffering  from  at  this  time  in  America ;  but 
they  are  certainly  not  to  be  charged  to  co-educa- 
tion, for  that  has  been  so  little  tried  that  no  con- 
clusions can  as  yet  be  drawn  from  it. 

So  far  as  our  observation  goes,  the  number  of 
invalid  women  is  greater  in  the  class  of  fashion- 
able women  than  in  any  other ;  and  they  surely 
do  not  overtax  their  brains  in  studies  that  com- 
pose the  college  curriculum.  The  want  of  some 
noble  and  engrossing  subject  of  thought  and 
action  is,  in  our  opinion,  a  much  more  frequent 
cause  of  ill-health  than  over-study,  and  next  to 
that,  if  not  taking  precedence  of  it,  is  the  man- 
ner in  which  women  are  clothed.  The  corsets 
that  confine  the  waists  and  abdomen  as  if  in  a 
vice,  preventing  the  action  of  the  muscles  and 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  157 

pressing  down  the  contents  of  the  abdomen,  so 
as  to  displace  important  organs  ;  the  great  weight 
of  skirts  hanging  on  the  abdominal  muscles  ;  the 
long  skirts  that  fetter  the  limbs  and  prevent  a 
natural  movement  of  them  ;  the  thin  boots  that 
expose  the  feet  to  cold  and  damp  ;  the  high  heels 
that  throw  the  body  out  of  the  perpendicular 
line,  so  that  a  constant  strain  is  imposed  on  the 
muscles  to  keep  the  balance,  —  these  are  prolific 
causes  of  invalidism.  The  late  hours  and  con- 
tinued excitements  of  parties  and  balls,  the  great 
exposure  to  cold  from  changing  the  warm  dresses 
^  worn  in  winter  for  the  thin  party  dresses  for 
evening,  combined  with  the  unwholesome  diet 
on  such  occasions,  complete  the  destruction  of 
health,  never  robust  on  account  of  the  failure  to 
give  girls  the  out-of-door  active  exercises  which 
boys  enjoy,  while  as  yet  there  is  no  physiological 
reason  for  their  being  shut  up  in  the  house,  or 
only  taken  out  to  walk  dressed  so  finely  that  play 
and  exercise  are  out  of  the  question. 

There  is  still  another  case,  which  to  my  mind 
is  as  clear  as  the  overtaxing  of  brains  is  to  Dr. 


158  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

Clarke's  ;  and  that  is  the  necessity  for  women  to 
go  to  physicians  of  the  male  sex  when  they  need 
advice  for  their  peculiar  diseases.  The  medical 
colleges,  refusing  admission  to  women,  kept  them 
out  of  the  regular  avenues  for  acquiring  a  medi- 
cal education,  and  consequently  the  number  of 
educated  women  physicians  was  so  small  that 
they  could  scarcely  be  mentioned  as  treating  the 
diseases  of  women  ;  and  the  result  has  been  that 
for  a  long  period  women  have  been  treated  by  men 
who,  having  no  corresponding  organs,  could  not 
possibly  understand  their  diseases,  and  they  have 
been  left  uncured,  only  palliated,  and  often  made 
worse  by  this  great  error.  When  women  are 
permitted  to  add  the  light  of  science  and  art  to 
their  personal  experiences  and  similar  organiza- 
tions, we  may  look  for  a  healthier  race  of 
women. 

On  page  54  he  says  :  — 

"  This  growing  period  or  formative  epoch  ex- 
tends from  birth  to  the  age  of  twenty  or  twenty- 
five  years.  Its  duration  is  shorter  for  a  girl  than 
for  a  boy.  She  ripens  quicker  than  he.  In  the 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  159 

four  years  from  fourteen  to  eighteen,  she  accom- 
plishes an  amount  of  cell  change  and  growth 
which  Nature  does  not  require  of  a  boy  in  less 
than  twice  that  number  of  years.  It  is  obvious 
that,  to  secure  the  best  kind  of  growth  during 
this  period  and  the  best  development  at  the  end 
of  it,  the  waste  of  tissue  produced  by  study, 
work,  and  fashion  must  not  be  so  great  that 
repair  will  only  equal  it.  It  is  equally  obvious 
that  a  girl,  upon  whom  Nature  for  a  limited  period 
and  for  a  definite  purpose  imposes  so  great  a 
physiological  task,  will  not  have  as  much  power 
left  for  the  tasks  of  the  school  as  the  boy,  of 
whom  Nature  requires  less  at  the  correspond- 
ing epoch.  A  margin  must  be  left  for  growth. 
The  repair  must  be  greater  and  better  than  the 
waste." 

Did  it  not  occur  to  the  Doctor's  mind  that 
"  Nature,"  or  the  Creator,  in  making  woman, 
took  this  state  of  things  into  account,  and  pro- 
vided for  it,  by  supplying  the  female  organism 
at  this  period  with  a  power  of  more  rapid  cell 
growth  to  meet  this  want,  and  that  this  same 


l6o  SEX  AND   EDUCATION. 

power  would  be  needed  by  the  woman  when 
the  great  drain  of  reproducing  the  race  was 
made  upon  her  system  ?  If  such  had  not  been 
the  case,  women  would  succumb  at  once  to  the 
great  waste  necessitated  by  child-bearing,  and  no 
mother  would  live  to  have  a  second  child.  But 
the  Infinite  Father  knew  how  to  make  woman, 
so  that  under  ordinary  circumstances  she  could 
go  on  with  her  usual  activities,  and  bear  children 
without  injury  to  her  health,  and  often  with  an 
improvement  of  it.  For,  of  our  healthy  women 
at  sixty  or  seventy  years  of  age,  nearly  all  have 
been  mothers,  and  most  of  them  have  had  large 
families. 

When  the  Doctor  says,  "Two  considerations 
deserve  to  be  mentioned  in  this  connection  :  one 
is,  that  no  organ  or  function  in  plant,  animal,  or 
human  kind,  can  be  properly  regarded  as  a  dis- 
ability or  source  of  weakness,"  —  he  states  a 
well-known  fact  ;  but  when  he  attempts  to  show 
that  one  of  the  functions  of  woman  is  a  great 
disability,  and  necessarily  incapacitates  her  from 
the  performance  of  usual  duties  two  or  three 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  161 

days  out  of  every  thirty,  he  directly  contradicts 
his  first  statement.  Healthy  women  are  able  to 
go  on  with  their  usual  avocations  at  these  times, 
and  only  feeble  or  sickly  ones  require  the  rest 
he  speaks  of.  Those  girls  whose  physical  train- 
ing has  been  such  as  to  give  them  strong  bodies 
develop  naturally  and  without  suffering,  just  as 
boys  do,  and  find  no  necessity  for  dropping  all 
mental  and  physical  labor  two  days  in  every 
month.  Neither  men  nor  women  can  overtax 
for  a  long  time  their  mental  or  physical  natures, 
and  remain  well.  There  is  one  law  for  both,  and 
it  is  inflexible  ;  but  is  it  necessary  for  man  to  ask 
woman,  or  woman  man,  what  either  can  bear 
without  injury  ?  Must  not  each  be  a  law  unto 
himself  ?  Let  women  study  physiology  and 
thoroughly  understand  their  own  bodies,  and 
they  can  be  trusted  to  take  care  of  them.  Why 
the  Doctor  supposes  it  necessary  to  co-education 
that  women  should  study  like  men,  or  should  be 
obliged  to  stand  for  recitations,  I  cannot  imagine. 
Are  the  rules  of  college  inflexible,  like  the  laws 
of  the  Medes  and  Persians  ?  or  are  they  made  for 


162  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

the  best  good  of  the  students  ?  If  a  class  sits 
during  recitations,  does  it  follow  that  their  les- 
sons will  be  less  well  learned  ?  If  a  girl  can  get 
a  lesson  in  an  hour  that  requires  a  boy  an  hour 
and  a  half  to  learn,  will  it  be  necessary  for  her 
to  study  as  many  hours  as  the  boy,  to  keep  up 
with  him  ?  And  does  not  every  teacher  of  boys 
and  girls  know  that  girls,  as  a  rule,  take  less  time 
to  commit  their  tasks  than  boys  ?  By  the  Doc- 
tor's own  showing,  this  is  in  analogy  with  the 
processes  in  their  physical  frames  ;  for  he  says, 
"  In  the  four  years,  from  fourteen  to  eighteen, 
she  accomplishes  an  amount  of  physiological  cell 
change  and  growth  which  Nature  does  not  re- 
quire of  a  boy  in  less  than  twice  that  number  of 
years."  The  trouble  with  the  Doctor  is,  that  he 
has  a  pet  theory  that  women  must  not  do  mental 
or  physical  work  during  certain  periods  ;  and  so 
he  attributes  all  disease  in  women  to  failure  in 
securing  this  rest,  whether  it  be  want  of  devel- 
opment of  the  ovaries,  hemorrhages,  or  disease 
of  the  brain  ! 

But  we  would  again  thank  him  for  his  book, 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  163 

which  is  so  suggestive  that  thinking  women 
cannot  read  it  without  seeing  the  necessity,  for 
reformation  in  many  ways  of  the  false  ideas  and 
customs  regarding  woman's  training,  dressing, 
and  living  ;  and,  having  their  attention  called  to 
them,  it  is  to  be  hoped  they  will  make  an  earnest 
effort  to  improve  upon  them. 


1 64  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


X, 

BY   PROFESSOR   BASCOM. 

THE  following  is  an  extract  from  a  paper  read 
at  the  recent  Massachusetts  Teachers'  Conven- 
tion in  Worcester :  — 

To  the  present  point  of  composition  in  this 
paper,  I  had  not  had  the  opportunity  of  a  full 
perusal  of  Dr.  Clarke's  work,  entitled  "  Sex  in 
Education."  I  wish,  therefore,  to  add  a  few 
things  directly  bearing  on  it.  The  considera- 
tion chiefly  dwelt  on  by  Dr.  Clarke,  that  of 
periodicity  and  continuity,  respectively,  in  sex- 
ual development,  is  one  of  great  importance, 
demanding  earnest  and  thorough  attention.  His 
work  is  able,  candid,  and  fair.  It  is  not,  how- 
ever, fair  in  its  actual  practical  bearing  on  co- 
education. The  impression  is  made  by  it  that 
it  presses  peculiarly  upon  this  point,  and  that 
its  general  conclusions,  if  admitted,  are  well-nigh 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  165 

fatal  to  it.     This  is  not  true,  and  is  hardly  the 
author's  meaning. 

In  the  first  place,  the  general  debility  of 
women,  be  it  greater  or  less,  is  not  due  to  co- 
education in  higher  knowledge ;  for  such  an 
education  has  not  existed  among  us  to  a  de- 
gree sufficient  perceptibly  to  affect  the  general 
constitution.  It  is  due  to  an  ignorance  and 
inattention  to  physiological  law  that  have  charac- 
terized all  our  action  in  business,  social,  and 
educational  relations,  in  the  former  even  more 
than  in  the  latter.  Separate  training,  as  that  at 
Mt.  Holyoke,  has  been  as  deeply  affected  by  it 
as  joint  education,  like  that  at  Oberlin.  The 
point  raised  by  Dr.  Clarke  bears  on  all  our 
action,  not  pre-eminently  on  one  part  of  it,  and 
that  hitherto  a  most  insignificant  part,  the  por- 
tion expressed  in  conjoint  higher  education.  To 
give  the  hygienic  considerations  involved  this 
peculiar  and  limited  application  is  illogical  and 
unfair.  The  reform  called  for  will  effect  this 
method  in  common  with  a  hundred  other  things. 
If  the  conclusions  already  reached  by  us  in  this 


1 66  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

paper  are  to  be  altered  by  the  considerations 
presented  by  Dr.  Clarke,  it  must  be  by  showing 
that  co-education  is  inconsistent  with  a  proper 
regard  of  the  hygienic  rules  involved  in  sexual 
development.  The  present  debility  of  women 
goes  for  nothing  in  the  argument.  This  debility, 
as  due  in  given  cases  to  a  false  training,  goes 
for  nothing,  since  our  inattention  has  been 
general,  and  covers  this  field  with  many  another. 
We  might  as  well  argue  against  social  inter- 
course, since  this,  even  oftener  than  lessons, 
has  been  the  provocation  to  excess.  The  only 
real  question,  then,  between  Dr.  Clarke  and 
co-education  is  this  :  Can  co-education  be  so 
altered  as  to  respect,  in  both  sexes,  the  laws 
of  development  ?  He  himself  practically  con- 
cedes that  it  can  be.  He  only  objects  finally 
and  peremptorily  to  identical  co-education  ; 
that  is,  to  precisely  the  same  tasks,  at  all  times, 
for  all  parties.  To  this  we  also  object,  as 
unfitted  for  the  best  development  of  boys  and 
girls  alike.  The  active  and  the  inert,  the  bright 
and  the  dull,  cannot  be  harnessed  together  with- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  1 67 

out  loss  on  one  side  or  the  other.  Our  educa- 
tion, in  the  interest  of  boys  as  well  as  of  girls, 
calls  for  more  elasticity,  less  pressure,  more 
variable  and  proportionate  stimulus.  Construct 
a  method  good  for  boys  of  all  kinds,  pliant  to 
their  wants,  keeping  up  with  the  best,  and  fall- 
ing back  to  the  poorest,  and  we  shall  have  a 
system  sufficiently  flexible  to  include  girls,  under 
their  own  law  of  development. 

Indeed,  the  rigidity  of  college  courses  is  pre- 
cisely that  which  needs  modification  ;  and,  if  this 
is  to  come  with  co-education,  so  much  the  better 
for  the  joint  discipline.  The  average  girl,  carry- 
ing weight  as  she  does  in  the  laws  of  her  con- 
stitution, is  not  as  far  off  from  the  average  boy 
as  the  stupid  boy  from  the  quick-witted  one. 
Unite  these  two  well  in  one  system,  and  that 
system  will  have  play  enough  to  embrace  girls 
also  advantageously.  Our  present  difficulties 
are  due  to  bad  education,  not  to  co-education  ; 
to  an  ignorance  of  the  laws  of  hygiene,  not  to 
a  knowledge  of  these  and  their  witting  violation. 
Educate  women  more  thoroughly,  and  they  will 


168  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

be  more  cognizant  and  observant  of  these  con- 
ditions of  success.  As  things  now  are,  they 
owe  their  disease  to  their  ignorance :  they  are 
not  weak  because  they  are  wise,  but  weak  be- 
cause they  are  not  wise. 

The  critical  period,  according  to  Dr.  Clarke, 
is  found  between  the  ages  of  fourteen  and 
eighteen.  This  is  a  period  for  the  most  part 
prior,  and  may  to  advantage  be  always  prior, 
to  that  given  to  higher  education,  and  one  cov- 
ered by  the  kind  and  accommodating  provisions 
of  home.  I  have  not  the  slightest  doubt  that, 
if  the  general  temper  that  is  encouraged  by  Dr. 
Clarke's  essay,  were  left  to  shape  a  sexual  cur- 
riculum for  women,  it  would  issue  in  a  feeble 
intellectual  mood,  a  proportionate  diversion  of 
time,  strength,  and  interest  to  society,  —  sure 
to  absorb  unoccupied  powers,  heedless  and 
headstrong  in  its  use  of .  them,  —  and  thus  ulti- 
mately in  strengthening  the  very  evil  warred 
with.  Society  is  more  to  be  dreaded  than  edu- 
cation. On  the  other  hand,  devote  attention  to 
a  complete  elastic  common  curriculum,  and  the 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  \  69 

tastes  will  be  elevated,  the  judgment  sobered, 
the  conditions  of  success  made  more  apparent, 
and  ultimately  that  breadth  and  strength  of 
character  reached  which  are  sure  to  express 
themselves  in  a  wise  mastery  of  natural  law. 
If  we  are  bound  to  have  a  thoroughly  flexible 
and  fit  discipline  for  boys,  in  reaching  it  we 
shall  also  furnish  appropriate  conditions  for 
girls,  and  all  the  reasons  for  co-education  urged 
by  us  will  apply  in  full  force.  The  transition 
from  a  rigid  to  a  pliant  method  will  necessarily 
take  place  slowly  ;  but  we  do  well  to  remember 
that  the  cast-iron  mode  is  as  firmly  wrought  into 
separate  as  into  conjoint  education,  and  consti- 
tutes no  ground  of  choice  between  them.  Both 
are  to  be  reformed,  both  are  capable  of  reform, 
and  in  the  interests  of  all  parties.  Dr.  Clarke's 
criticism  is  destructive,  not  constructive.  Let 
him  undertake  to  build  up  a  curriculum,  and 
the  advantage  will  at  once  pass  to  his  oppo- 
nents. 


I/O  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

XI. 

BY   ABBY  W.   MAY. 

\_Extract  from  Annual  Report  of  Committee  on  Work 
of  the  New  England  IV omen1  s  Club,  read  May  31, 
I873-] 

OUR  programme  for  the  year  just  closed  occu- 
pied itself  with  the  question  of  women's  fitness 
for  entering  practical  life,  presented  from  several 
points  of  view.  At  our  first  meeting,  Miss  Kel- 
logg, in  an  able  manner,  set  before  us  the  views 
of  several  of  the  most  eminent  scientific  men  on 
the  question  of  the  relative  capacity  of  women 
for  the  highest  education.  The  extracts  Miss 
Kellogg  gave  proved  that  there  is  a  good  deal 
of  difference  of  opinion  among  authorities  ;  but, 
whatever  may  be  the  conclusion  to-day  of  one 
or  another  man,  the  great  desideratum  is  that 
the  matter  should  be  frankly  discussed.  Truth 
will  inevitably  result  sooner  or  later;  and  that 
is  what  we  chiefly  desire,  even  when  the  lesson 


SEX  AND  EDUCA  TION.  1 7 1 

of  patience  is  bitterly  hard.  This  valuable  rt- 
snm6  of  the  opinions  of  others  was  followed  by 
a  highly  interesting  paper  from  Dr.  Edward 
H.  Clarke,  upon  the  health  of  women,  as  af- 
fecting steady,  persistent  mental  application. 
Dr.  Clarke  —  the  skilful  physician,  the  jealous 
guardian  of  health,  to  whose  notice  comes  daily 
most  distressing  knowledge  of  the  suffering 
caused  by  a  lack  of  it,  especially  among  New 
England  women  —  made  a  strong  plea  for  sav- 
ing women  from  the  over-pressure  and  false 
methods  of  living,  under  which  so  many  men, 
as  well  as  women,  break  down.  The  sad  fact 
of  great  physical  weakness  among  our  women  is 
beyond  dispute.  In  that  respect,  there  is  no 
room  for  difference  of  opinion;  though  we 
thought  Dr.  Clarke  did  not  sufficiently  recognize 
the  gain  which  has  been  made  in  some  respects 
within  the  last  few  years.  But  the  discussion 
which  followed  the  paper  showed  that  the  ma- 
jority could  not  agree  with  Dr.  Clarke,  in  charg- 
ing much  of  the  misery  upon  high  education  or 
the  co-education  of  the  sexes.  There  are  •  many 


172  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

other  deep  and  clear  causes  for  it ;  and  too  little 
education,  as  carried  up  to  any  high  plane,  has 
there  been  to  charge  it  with  so  wide-spread  an 
evil.  And,  again,  the  statistics  which  have  come 
to  notice  are  at  least  doubtful  proofs  of  such 
statements.  On  the  contrary,  they  seem  to 
prove  that  mental  training  is  not  only  good,  but 
requisite  for  physical  health  ;  and  why  should  it 
not  be  so  ?  God  has  made  women,  as  men,  com- 
pound creatures,  with  a  fivefold  nature;  and  it 
cannot  be  that  either  side,  physical,  mental,  moral, 
affectional,  or  spiritual,  can  suffer  loss  without 
injury  to  the  whole.  It  is  only  in  the  harmoni- 
ous development  of  all  that  each  finds  its  own 
perfection.  The  perfect  woman  must  have  a 
sound  body,  a  vigorous  mind,  a  conscience  quick, 
and  a  heart  large  enough  and  true  enough  to 
warm  and  sweeten  the  whole.  Give  her  the 
thorough  training  of  all  these,  and  crown  her 
with  a  spirit  seeking  the  highest,  and  you  have 
a  woman  such  as  we  conceive  God  meant  her 
to  be.  Who  shall  dare  to  say  that  mental  cul- 
ture must  be  kept  on  a  poorer  plane  than  the 


-  SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  173 

very  best  there  is,  because  of  danger  to  a  woman's 
body,  —  a  danger  different  in  its  nature  from  that 
which  men  so  often  find  in  unwise  mental  effort  ? 
No  one  would  plead  for  folly,  as  applied  to  the 
training  of  either  sex  ;  but  that  many  women  arc 
feeble  seems  a  poor  reason  for  depriving  those 
who  are  strong  of  any  advantage  that  the  world 
can  afford  them.  Does  he  want  it  ?  is  the  ques- 
tion we  ask  in  relation  to  men.  Does  she  want 
it  ?  would  seem  to  be  the  only  fair  one  to  ask  of 
the  other  sex.  For  both  sexes,  lack  of  health 
must  often  be  practically  an  insurmountable  bar- 
rier. Why  cannot  all  interested  in  this  question 
unite  in  holding  up  a  high  standard  of  health,  in 
themselves  and  for  others,  since  no  other  obstacle 
can  long  prevent  women  from  having  all  the  edu- 
cational advantages  they  can  use. 


1/4  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


XII. 

BY  MARIA  A.   ELMORE. 

DR.  CLARKE  talks  as  though  women  in  every 
thing  but  college  life  had  perfect  liberty  to 
change  at  will  their  position  from  the  erect  to 
the  reclining;  as  though  nothing  else  required 
four  weeks*  labor  in  a  month  ;  as  though  a  regu- 
lar, sustained,  and  uninterrupted  course  of  work 
was  something  of  which  they  have  never  had  any 
experience  ;  and  as  though  identical  education  of 
the  sexes  was  the  only  regimen  that  ignored  the 
periodic  tides  and  reproductive  apparatus  of  their 
organization. 

We  would  like  to  have  Dr.  Clarke  inform  us 
what  regimen  there  is  that  does  not  ignore 
them  ? 

While  but  very  few  women  are  called  by  a 
chapel-bell  to  a  standing  prayer,  thousands  and 
tens  of  thousands  in  America  are  called  by  the 


SEX  AXD  EDUCATIOX.  1/5 

bell  of  "  that  university,  which  has  a  water-wheel 
at  the  bottom,"  to  all-day  standing  tasks  at  the 
noisy  loom,  and  this  followed  from  half-past  six 
in  the  morning  till  half-past  six  at  night,  with  the 
intermission  only  of  half,  three-quarters,  or  the 
whole  of  an  hour  at  noon,  throughout  every 
working-day  in  the  year. 

Has  Dr.  Clarke  written  a  book  on  "  Sex  in 
Manufacturing  Establishments  "  ?  If  he  hasn't, 
he  ought  to. 

Women  stand  behind  the  counter,  obliged  to 
be  at  their  post  just  such  a  time  every  morning, 
and  to  wait  on  customers,  if  need  be,  the  livelong 
day.  Are  they  excused  from  work  every  fourth 
week  ?  Can  they  sit,  stand,  or  recline  at  their 
pleasure  ?  Are  they  exempted  from  tending  to 
the  wants  of  their  employers'  patrons  because 
they  feel  indisposed  ?  Nay,  in  many  instances 
are  they  not  required  to  be  on  their  feet  all  the 
time,  even  when  there  are  no  customers  ? 

Has  Dr.  Clarke  written  a  book  on  "  Sex  in 
Clerkships"? 

Women  have,  year  out  and  year  in,  busily  plied 


I  /  6  SEX  AND  ED  L/C  A  TfON. 

the  needle  in  tailors'  and  dressmakers'  shops,  hav- 
ing no  opportunity  to  change  at  will  their  position 
from  the  sitting  to  the  standing,  walking,  or  re- 
clining. 

Has  Dr.  Clarke  written  a  book  on  "  Sex  in 
Workshops,"  or  "  Sex  in  Sewing  "  ? 

School-teachers  are  expected  to  be  in  their 
school-rooms  promptly  on  the  hour  every  school- 
day  in  the  year,  ready  to  discharge  their  duties  to 
their  pupils.  Where  is  the  school-board  that  ever 
allowed  its  female  teachers  to  take  a  week's  vaca- 
tion every  month  ?  Where  is  that  man  who  would 
have  a  young  woman  teach  in  his  ward  or  neigh- 
borhood who  should  make  application  to  him  in 
this  wise :  "  Sir,  I  am  very  desirous  of  becoming 
a  teacher.  I  want  a  school,  and  will  do  all  in  my 
power  to  bring  it  to  a  standard  of  high  moral  ex- 
cellence and  worth.  But  I  must  tell  you  that  I 
cannot  teach  for  four  consecutive  weeks.  I  can 
teach  only  three  weeks  at  a  time :  the  fourth  I 
must  have  to  myself.  Mighty  and  powerful  de- 
mands are  then  made  upon  my  constitution,  and 
it  requires  all  the  strength  and  energy  I  can  com- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

mand  to  meet  them.  To  attempt  at  such  times 
to  manage  and  instruct  an  unruly  and  rollicking 
set  of  young  urchins  would  derange  the  tides  of 
my  organization,  divert  blood  from  the  reproduc- 
tive apparatus  to  my  head,  and  consequently  add 
to  my  piety  at  the  expense  of  my  blood." 

Women  teach  school  under  a  regimen  that 
pays  no  more  regard  to  their  bodily  organism 
than  to  that  of  men.  Yet  in  the  face  of  this  fact 
Dr.  Clarke  tells  us  it  is  a  sin  under  such  a  regi- 
men to  attend  school  as  a  pupil !  Are  the  duties 
and  responsibilities  of  a  pupil  so  much  more 
arduous  and  exacting  than  those  of  a  teacher 
that  a  much  more  favorable  regimen  must  be 
prescribed  for  the  former  than  for  the  latter  ? 

Imagine  Miss  Applicant,  in  quest  of  a  situa- 
tion to  do  housework,  addressing  mistress  of  the 
house  as  follows  :  "  You  know,  my  dear  woman, 
that  public  opinion  and  sentiment  have  imposed 
upon  girls  a  boy's  regimen  ;  that  is,  that  girls 
who  go  out  to  work  are  expected  to  work  every 
day  of  the  month,  just  as  boys  do.  Now  this  is 
altogether  wrong  and  contrary  to  the  laws  of 
8«  L 


178  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

nature.  It  is  grounded  on  the  supposition  that 
sustained  regularity  of  action  may  be  as  safely 
required  of  a  girl  as  a  boy  ;  that  there  is  no 
physical  necessity  for  periodically  relieving  her 
from  standing,  walking,  cooking,  or  baking  ;  that 
the  striking  of  the  clock  may  call  her  as  well  as 
him  to  a  daily  morning  walk  with  the  baby,  with 
standing  work  at  the  end  of  it,  regardless  of  the 
danger  that  such  exercise,  by  deranging  the  tide 
of  her  organization,  may  add  to  her  piety  at  the 
expense  of  her  blood ;  that  she  may  bother  her 
brain  over  bread,  pies,  cake,  preserves,  condi- 
ments, and  the  like,  with  equal  and  sustained 
force  on  every  day  of  the  month,  thus  diverting 
blood  from  the  reproductive  apparatus  to  the 
head ;  in  short,  that  she,  like  her  brother,  de- 
velops health,  strength,  blood,  and  nerve  by  a 
regular,  uninterrupted,  and  sustained  course  of 
work.  All  this  is  not  justified  either  by  expe- 
rience or  physiology.  Girls  lose  all  these  by 
doing  housework  all  the  time.  By  requiring  a 
girl  to  perform  the  same  round  of  duties  every 
day  of  the  month,  you  impose  upon  her  a  regi- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  1 79 

men  which  ignores  the  periodical  tides  and  repro- 
ductive apparatus  of  her  organization.  Allow  me 
to  tell  you,  dear  madame,  that  work  every  fourth 
week  the  same  as  the  other  three,  lack  of  privi- 
lege to  change  her  position  when  she  needs 
change,  persistent  exercise  and  constant  labor, 
which  you  say  any  girl  who  works  in  your  house- 
hold will  be  subjected  to,  are  wicked.  It  will  do 
very  well  for  a  boy ;  it  will  toughen  and  make  a 
man  of  him  ;  but  it  can  be  only  prejudicial  to  a 
girl.  Surely,  ma'am,  you  can't  expect  girls  to 
work  every  week :  they  would  become  agenes 
under  such  a  regimen  as  that." 

Would  she  be  likely 'to  secure  the  situation? 
Is  it  the  prerogative  of  those  who  go  out  to 
housework,  or  who  perform  any  kind  of  service 
or  labor,  to  suspend  work  every  fourth  week  ? 
Are  not  all  women  expected  to  do  the  bidding  of 
their  employers,  the  same  as  men,  however  great 
their  disinclination  ? 

Does  that  regimen  which  men  are  ever  pre- 
scribing for  woman,  namely,  marriage,  grant  her 
one  week's  cessation  from  labor  out  of  every 


180  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

four?  Can  a  mother,  when  weary  and  over- 
tasked, relinquish  the  work  and  care  of  her 
family,  and  engage  her  thoughts  upon  nothing 
save  that  of  her  own  physical  weaknesses,  and 
how  to  relieve  them  ? 

No,  women  may  work  in  the  factory,  in  the 
store,  in  the  workshop,  in  the  field,  in  the  dining- 
saloon,  at  the  wash-tub,  at  the  ironing-table,  at 
the  sewing-machine,  —  do  all  these  things,  and 
many  more  equally  hard,  from  Monday  morning 
till  Saturday  night  every  week  in  the  year  ;  may 
wear  their  lives  out  toilTng  for  their  children, 
and  doing  the  work  for  their  families  that  their 
husbands  ought  to  do,  ami  nobody  raises  the  arm 
of  opposition  ;  but  just  now,  because  there  is  a 
possibility  and  even  probability  that  in  matters 
of  education  women  will  be  as  honorably  treated 
as  men,  lo !  Dr.  Clarke  comes  forth  and  tells  us 
it  ought  not  to  be  so,  because,  forsooth,  the  peri- 
odical tides  and  reproductive  apparatus  of  her 
organization  will  be  ignored ! 

If  there  are  any  spheres  of  labor  or  of  action 
that  have  with  earnest  solicitude  more  carefully 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  l8l 

and  faithfully  looked  after  the  health  of  the  girls 
and  women  who  every  day  repair  within  their 
walls  than  have  many  of  our  seminaries  of  learn- 
ing, we  have  yet  to  learn  the  fact. 

So  long  as  men  are  willing  that  women  should 
do  all  or  any  of  the  things  herein  specified,  beside 
the  thousand  and  one  things  to  which  we  have 
no  space  to  allude ;  so  long  as  men  are  filling 
she  should  enter  marriage,  a  regimen  which  im- 
poses more  duties,  responsibilities,  trials,  burj 
dens,  cares,  and  sorrows  than  any  other  can, 
which  taxes  health,  strength,  blood,  and  nerve 
infinitely  more  than  any  thing  else  she  can  ever 
do  ;  so  long  as  they  are  willing  that  she  should 
endure  the  wear  and  tear  of  wifehood  and  mother- 
hood, the  severest  and  most  trying  ordeals  through 
which  human  beings  are  ever  called  to  pass,  and, 
in  comparison  to  the  burdens  which  it  inflicts 
upon  her  physical  organization,  all  others  are  of 
a  straw's  weight ;  so  long  as  men  are  willing  that 
woman  should  act,  work,  labor,  earn  her  living  in 
these  various  capacities,  not  one  of  which  gives 
her  more  opportunity  to  favor  herself  than  it 


1 82  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

gives  man,  is  it  not  insulting  for  a  physician  to 
single  out  one  individual  phase  of  action,  and 
declare  that  it  is  a  sin  for  woman  to  share  equally 
with  man  in  the  advantages  it  affords,  because  it 
don't  pay  so  much  attention  to  the  subject  of 
catamenia  as  he  thinks  it  ought  ? 

Will  Dr.  Clarke  please  tell  us  why  colleges,  or 
places  of  learning  of  any  kind,  should  be  denied 
to  woman  on  the  ground  that  an  insufficient 
amount  of  deference  is  given  to  her  physiologi- 
cal nature,  any  more  than  other  institutions 
which  overlook  it  entirely  ? 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  183 


XIII. 
BY  A.   C.  GARLAND. 

A  VERY  flattering  notice  of  the  volume  bearing 
the  title  "  Sex  in  Education  "  having  appeared  in 
the  "Journal,"  one  "ambitious  woman,"  who  is 
not  "fretting  under  the  restraints  which  nature 
imposes,"  but  those  arbitrary  and  unjust  social 
laws  which  have  grown  out  of  a  false,  partial, 
and  superficial  view  of  nature's  laws,  and  who  is 
not  "meditating  the  dangerous  experiment  of 
making  herself  a  man,"  but  has  long  claimed  for 
herself  and  other  women  the  right  of  deciding 
what  constitutes  womanhood,  feels  moved  to 
reply. 

Not  having  read  the  book  in  question,  we  shall 
simply  attack  the  position  of  its  admirer.  We 
find,  first,  a  complaint  that  the  "subject"  of 
woman's  co-education  with  man  "has  been 
treated  as  a  matter  purely  of  moral  claim,  not 


1 84  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

of  natural  capacity,"  by  many.  Those  who  have 
claimed  equal  educational  advantages  for  women 
as  a  right  have  in  nearly  if  not  all  cases  done  so 
because  of  the  following  unanswerable  reasons  : 
'While  women  are  taxed  for  the  support  of  higher 
schools  of  instruction,  they  have  a  moral  claim 
on  such  institutions  for  the  equal  education  of 
both  sexes.  The  statement  of  any  author,  that 
"  experience  and  careful  observation  have  proved 
that  the  higher  education  of  women  has  been 
detrimental  to  their  health,  is  simply  an  assump- 
tion of  his  own,  which  can  be  met  by  as  deter- 
mined and  well-proven  statements  on  the  other 
side.  The  fact  is,  that  we  cannot  absolutely  set- 
tle the  limits  of  woman's  strength  and  endurance 
by  any  experiments  made  and  recorded  so  imper- 
fectly as  they  must  be  at  a  time  like  the  present, 
when  the  majority  of  women  who  are  educating 
themselves  thoroughly  in  public  colleges  are  do- 
ing so  at  the  cost  of  home  comforts,  and  under 
a  severe  pressure  resulting  from  poverty.  There 
was  a  time  in  the  history  of  New  England  when 
the  great  majority  of  young  men  who  were  study- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  1 85 

ing  for  the  Christian  ministry  were  in  such  poor 
health  that  sanctity  and  an  earnest  purpose 
came  to  be  associated  in  almost  every  person's 
mind  with  a  body  just  ready  to  fall  a  victim  to 
any  disease,  a  cadaverous  or  "  spiritual "  face,  and 
a  thin  and  wasted  hand.  Why  was  this  ?  Not 
because  the  simple  preparation  of  study  injured 
them,  but  because  they  could  not  afford  the  gen- 
erous living  and  comfortable  homes  which  the 
body  requires  for  its  development,  and  their 
necessities  compelled  them  to  work  outside  their 
studies,  while  their  student  enthusiasm  led  them 
to  disregard  many  laws  of  health.  For  these 
same  reasons  many  a  woman  to-day  fails  in  her 
course,  when  so  near  the  end  that  a  few  more 
years  would  land  her  in  competence  and  congenial 
employment.  The  health  of  the  young  ladies 
in  Vassar  College  —  where  the  curriculum  is 
quite  as  exhaustive  and  exhausting  as  the  vari- 
ous special  courses  at  Harvard,  to  say  the  least  — 
is  excellent,  as  statistics,  not  theories,  show.  In 
the  early  history  of  Oberlin,  the  pioneer  in  higher 
education  of  the  sexes,  we  read  the  names  of 


1 86  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

many  women  who,  so  far  from  being  "  wrecks," 
physically  at  least,  have  lived  to  bear  healthy 
children,  have  borne  their  full  share  of  woman's 
special  duties,  and,  in  addition,  have  made  them- 
selves famous  in  various  departments  of  literary 
and  reformatory  labor. 

The  recent  census  reports  show  that  of  all 
classes  of  women  most  subject  to  insanity  and 
other  diseases,  the  "farmers'  wives"  are  most 
afflicted.  Does  higher  education  do  this  work  ? 
Our  observation,  neither  "  professional "  nor  very 
"  extensive,"  but  careful  and  fair,  has  shown  more 
healthful  and  strong  women  among  the  better 
educated,  even  the  intellectual,  than  in  those 
whose  lives  have  been  devoted  exclusively  to 
the  duties  which  their  sex  imposes  on  them.  It 
seems  reasonable  that  the  profession  which  calls 
for  most  varied  talent,  demands  most  strength  of 
brain  and  body,  is  the  most  potent  power  for 
good  or  evil  which  the  world  knows,  that  of 
motherhood,  should  be  freely  accorded  every  ad- 
vantage of  physical,  intellectual,  and  moral  train- 
ing which  the  State  has  it  in  its  power  to  bestow. 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  l8; 

But  we  insist  upon  it  that  no  person  who 
cusses  the  educational  problem  of  the 
day,  with  an  argument  "  based  on  the  postulate 
that  woman  finds  her  normal  development  in  ful- 
filling the  functions  of  wife  and  mother,  and  that 
any  education  which  tends  to  unfit  her  for  these 
highest  offices  is  not  a  boon,  but  a  curse,"  is 
worthy  to  be  followed  by  just  men  or  women. 
Men  and  women  are  "  normally  developed  "  when, 
and  when  only,  they  are  rounded  and  broadened 
by  culture  of  body,  mind,  and  heart,  into  a  sym- 
metrical character.  We  have  no  more  right  to 
say  that  women  shall  be  educated  to  be  wives 
and  mothers  than  that  men  shall  be  educated  to 
be  husbands  and  fathers  ;  and  no  more  right  to 
say  that  a  woman  is  not  fulfilling  her  "  highest  " 
office;  who  is  laboring  for  the  world  in  some 
other  sphere  than  that  of  wifehood  or  mother- 
hood, than  we  have  to  declare  a  man  abnormally 
or  imperfectly  "  developed  "  who  has  deemed  it 
best  to  live  his  life  unmarried.  Until  men  are 
willing  to  discuss  woman's  education  in  the  same 
way  they  do  that  of  their  own  sex,  on  the  broad 


1 88  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

basis  of  individual  need,  individual  taste  and  tal- 
ent, arid  the  necessity  of  thorough  mental  train- 
ing of  all,  in  order  to  attain  the  highest  results 
to  the  country  and  the  world  ;  until  men  are  con- 
vinced that  the  human  being  and  its  needs  is 
paramount  in  importance,  and  that  sex,  with  all 
its  relations,  is  a  secondary  question,  which  must 
settle  itself  and  needs  no  legislation  ;  until,  in 
short,  men  comprehend  that  they  are  not  the 
guardians  of  woman,  and  have  no  right  to  force 
her  to  education,  or  restrain  her  from  the  same 
through  any  prudential  considerations  not  ap- 
plied equally  to  themselves,  —  every  woman  con- 
scious of  the  facts  that  her  soul  is  worth  more 
than  her  body,  and  her  eternal  relations  are  of 
more  importance  than  the  temporal,  will  "per- 
sistently "  and  reasonably  demand  that  the  final 
decision  in  regard  to  her  ability  to  endure  mental 
or  physical  strain,  her  power  for  study,  and  her 
need  for  the  same,  shall  rest  with  herself.  In 
spite  of  the  author  of  "  Sex  in  Education,"  we 
have  yet  to  see  convincing  proofs,  based  on  facts 
extensively  gathered  and  compiled,  of  the  un- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  189 

healthfulness  of  student  life  for  men  or  women, 
boys  or  girls,  when  the  laws  of  health,  namely, 
simple  living,  good  food,  abundant  sleep,  health- 
ful clothing,  and  sufficient  exercise  in  the  open 
air,  are  known  and  observed.  We  will  only  add 
our  wish  that  men  would  be  as  careful  for  the 
health  of  women  in  other  respects  as  they  claim 
to  be  in  the  matter  of  education  ;  and  sum  up  all 
we  would  like  to  say  on  this  vexed  question  in 
one  sentence :  That  man  or  woman  is  best  fitted 
for  his  or  her  special  relations  who  is  most 
thoroughly  and  harmoniously  developed  as  an 
individual. 


TESTIMONY     FROM     COLLEGES. 


DR.  EDWARD  H.  CLARKE. 

DEAR  SIR,  —  Having  held  the  office  of  Resi- 
dent Physician  in  Vassar  College  since  the  school 
opened,  —  September,  1 865,  —  it  seems  to  me  that 
I  have  the  right  to  make  respectful  but  earnest 
protest  against  the  implied  strictures  upon  the 
hygienic  teaching  and  practice  of  the  institution, 
which  I  find  in  the  history  of  "  Miss  D.,"  page 
79  of  "  Sex  in  Education." 

I  take  it  that  the  aim  of  your  book  is  to  show 
parents  and  teachers  the  wrong  they  do  women, 
and  so  the  race,  by  their  systematic  overtaxing 
of  the  mental  forces  during  the  critical  years  of 
girlhood,  when  the  reproductive  function  is  as- 
serting itself,  and  when  every  thing  that  would 
hinder  its  proper  establishment  should  be  care- 
fully avoided.  In  that  aim  I  bid  you  God-speed ; 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

and  it  is  because  I  feel  so  strongly  on  that  point, 
and  have  labored  so  zealously  to  make  practical 
application  of  this  physiological  principle,  that 
I  regret  that  you  should  have  taken  as  your  most 
elaborately  discussed  and  aggravated  case  one 
which  so  misrepresents  the  college  that  any 
person  who  is  at  all  acquainted  with  its  rules 
and  management  can  hardly  help  having  his 
confidence  in  the  book  shaken.  He  would  nat- 
urally say,  "This  being  so  largely  false,  where 
can  I  be  sure  of  finding  the  truth?" 

Vassar  College  does  not  receive  students  under 
fifteen  years  of  age,  even  for  the  first  preparatory 
class  (there  is  a  two  years'  preparatory  course). 
No  student  ever  entered  the  freshman  class 
at  fourteen. 

At  the  beginning  of  every  collegiate  year  the 
students  are  carefully  instructed  regarding  the 
precautions  which  are  periodically  necessary  for 
them.  They  are  positively  forbidden  to  take 
gymnastics  at  all  during  the  first  two  days  of 
their  period ;  and,  if  there  is  the  least  tendency 
toward  menorrhagia,  dysmenorrhoea,  or  other 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  IQ3 

like  irregularity,  to  forego  those  exercises  en- 
tirely. They  are  also  forbidden  to  ride  on  horse- 
back then ;  and,  moreover,  are  strongly  advised 
not  to  dance,  nor  run  up  and  down  stairs,  nor  do 
any  thing  else  that  gives  sudden  and  successive 
(even  though  not  violent)  shocks  to  the  trunk. 
They  are  encouraged  to  go  out  of  doors  for  quiet 
walks,  or  drives,  or  boating,  and  to  do  whatever 
they  can  to  steady  the  nervous  irritation,  and  to 
help  them  to  be  patient  with  themselves  through 
the  almost  inevitable  excitement  or  depression 
that  then  supervenes. 

That  a  student  should  faint  again  and  again 
in  the  gymnasium,  and  still  be  pushed  to  con- 
tinue her  exercises  there,  is  a  statement  that 
would  not  be  made  by  any  one  who  knows  the 
personal  physical  care  that  is  had  here,  not  only 
by  the  Resident  Physician,  but  by  all  the  teach- 
ers. It  is  a  statement  that  will  be  believed  by 
none  who  has  taken  any  pains  to  inform  himself 
of  the  methods  of  training  adopted  by  Vassar 
College. 

It  is  possible  that  a  student  began  here  to 
9  M 


194  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

menstruate  healthily,  and  ended  her  course  a 
victim  of  dysmenorrhcea  ;  but  does  it  give  "  a  fair 
chance  for  the  girls  "  to  argue  therefrom  that  the 
functional  disturbance  was  the  result  of  too  severe 
or  continued  study  ?  Do  you  know  that  she  pur- 
sued a  healthful  regimen  in  every  other  respect  ? 
As  an  offset  to  this  side  of  the  story,  I  can  give 
you  a  hundred  cases  -in  which  dysmenorrhcea  of 
long  standing  and  aggravated  character  has  been 
cured  here, —  cured  mainly,  as  I  believe,  by  patient 
persistence  in  the  regular  habits  of  mental  and 
physical  life  that  here  obtain. 

We  do  not  attempt  to  cut  down  the  work  of 
each  girl  every  fourth  week,  but  we  do  mean  so 
to  regulate  the  work  of  the  whole  time  that  the 
end  of  no  day  shall  find  her  overtaxed,  even  if 
that  day  has  borne  the  added  periodic  burden. 
It  is  our  aim  so  to  combine  opportunity  for  seri- 
ous mental  activity  with  physical  training  and 
individual  freedom  from  tiresome  restraint  or 
hint  of  espionage,  that  vigor  of  head  and  heart 
and  body  will  be  the  happy  result.  As  a  rule, 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  1 95 

we  succeed ;  the  success  varying  of  course  with 
the  stuff  we  have  to  work  with. 

The  average  age  of  the  graduates  of  Vassar 
College  is  twenty-one  and  a  half. 

Too  young,  I  grant  you ;  and  we  hope  to 
improve  on  it  as  the  years  go,  and  knowledge, 
physiological  and  otherwise  liberal,  increases. 

Eighteen  is  young  enough  for  any  woman  to 
begin  this  course.  At  that  age,  with  average 
endowment  of  mind  and  body,  she  pursues  it 
with  gladness  and  ends  it  with  rejoicing,  as  can 
be  proved  by  a  goodly  number  of  Vassar's 
alumnae. 

Hoping  that  your  sense  of  justice  will  suggest 
methods  by  which  the  erroneous  impressions  that 
your  book  conveys  concerning  Vassar  College 
may  be,  as  far  as  possible,  corrected, 
Lam,  sir, 

Respectfully  yours, 

ALIDA  C.  AVERY. 

VASSAR  COLLEGE,  Poughkeepsie,  N.Y., 
Nov.  4,  1873. 


196 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


ANTIOCH    COLLEGE. 


Individual. 

Year  of 
Graduation. 

o 

No.  of 
Children. 

Health. 

Remarks. 

i 

1857 

Married 

3 

Not  living 

Died  1874. 

2 

t 

n 

i 

Good 

Taught     ii    years.    Now    in 

Indiana. 

3 

„ 

>j 

2 

„ 

Has  taught  ever  since  gradu- 

ating.    Now  in  Ohio. 

4 

1858 

» 

2 

Very  good 

Taught  five  years.     Now  in 
Ohio. 

s 

N 

^ 

6 

Good 

Has  taught    school.      Slight 

jronchial  trouble. 

6 

1859 

99 

3 

w 

7 

" 

3 

Uncertain 

Has  taught  school. 

8 

>l 

Good 

Taught    thirteen    years,    till 
married  in  1872. 

9 

)y 

2  or  3 

No        recent        intelligence. 

10 

1860 

Single 

n 

Health  good  as  far  as  known. 
Taught  some  years.     Now  in 

England. 

ii 

12 

13 

14 

H 

Married 
Single 

Married 

2 
I 

Very  good 

Taught  three  years. 
Has  taught  school. 
Physician  in  Missouri. 
Has  taught  school. 

IS 

„ 

Single 

„        „ 

Constantly  a  teacher,  except 

• 

two  years  in  Europe. 

16 

Married 

}j 

Minister      in      Connecticut. 

17 

1861 

Good 

Lately  married. 
Taught  three  years.    Journal- 

ist in  Ohio. 

18 
19 

1862 

;; 

I 
I 

Not  living 

Has  taught  school. 
Died  of  hereditary  consump- 

tion. 

20 

21 

J 

» 

I 
I 

"Good* 

22 

99 

y, 

2 

Very  good 

Resides  in  Ohio. 

23 

2 

99             99 

Resides  in  Vermont. 

24 

2 

Resides  in  New  York. 

M 

}) 

"Good 

Lately  married. 

26 

99 

3 

Has  taught  school. 

27 

1863 

„ 

2 

Very  good 

Taught  four  years,  till  mar- 

ried. 

28 
29 

1864 
1866 

Married 

3 

Not  good 

Taught  one  year. 
Troubled  with  scrofula,  dat- 

ing back  earlier  than  her  schod 
days.      Practises    medicine    in 

Missouri. 

^ 

(* 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 


'97 


|  Individual.  J 

Year  of 
Graduation. 

s  m 

If 
r 

No.  of 
Children. 

Health. 

Remarks. 

30 

1868 

Single 

Very  good 

Has  just  returned  from  three 
years  in  Europe,  where  she  took 

99 

Married 

T 

Good 

lone  pedestrian  journeys. 
Has    taught    school    and   is 

teaching  now. 

32 

2 

99 

Taught  three  years. 

33 

1869 

Single 

» 

Taught    constantly    and     is 

teaching  now. 

34 

1870 

Married 

Not  living 

Died  in  1871. 

35 

M 

H 

I 

Good 

Has  taught  school  in    Mis- 

• 

souri. 

36 
37 

1871 

Single 

I 

Unknown 

Taught  one  year. 
Came  to  college  in  delicate 
health,  which   improved  while 

there.      The    youngest  woman 

38 

.872 

j. 

Not  living 

who  ever  graduated  at  Antioch. 
Died  1873  of  hereditary  con- 

sumption.    • 

39 

„ 

n 

Fair 

Teaching  in  Massachusetts. 

40 

1873 

M 

Good 

41 

" 

" 

ti 

All  the  time  I  was  at  Antioch  College  I  never 
heard  of  a  young  lady  in  the  college  requiring  a 
physician's  advice.  Among  the  seven  girls  in 
my  class  I  never  remember  an  instance  of  ill- 
ness :  they  were  always  at  recitations,  and 
always  had  their  lessons.  I  spent  four  years  at 
Antioch,  —  two  at  the  theological  school ;  and  I 
have  been  over  ten  years  a  settled  pastor,  and 
I  never  yet  was  absent  from  an  engagement  or 
suspended  labor  on  account  of  sickness.  When 


1 98  SEX  A  ND  ED  UCA  TION. 

in  Kansas,  I  spoke  every  day  from  the  first  of 
July  to  the  fifth  of  November,  besides  travelling 
to  my  appointments  each  day,  some  days  giving 
two  lectures  and  preaching  Sundays,  making  in 
all  two  hundred  and  five  speeches,  averaging 
more  than  an  hour  in  length,  and  came  home 
just  as  well  as  I  went ;  and  this  moment  I  am  as 
well  as  ever,  and  could  walk  ten  miles  in  a  day 
with  ease.  To  me  such  statements  as  Dr.  Clarke's 
seem  absurd,  and  contrary  to  everybody's  ex- 
perience. .  .  . 

The  ill-health  of  the  women  of  our  time  is  not 
due  to  study  or  regularity  in  study :  it  is  due  to 
the  want  of  regularity,  and  want  of  aim  and  pur- 
pose, and  want  of  discipline.  If  you  should  take 
the  whole  number  of  women  in  this  country  who 
have  graduated  from  a  regular  college  with  men, 
and  place  them  side  by  side  with  the  same  num- 
ber of  women  who  have  not  had  that  course  of 
study,  select  them  where  you  will,  the  college 
graduates  will  be  stronger  in  mind  and  body, 
able  to  endure  more  and  work  harder  than 
the  others.  This  I  am  sure  of,  as  I  am  ac- 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  199 

quainted  with  many  of  the  somewhat  small 
number  of  women  graduates ;  and  I  know  some- 
thing of  other  women,  having  belonged  to  vari- 
ous female  seminaries  at  different  times.  —  Rev. 
Olympia  Brown. 


MICHIGAN    UNIVERSITY. 

ABOUT  eighty  of  the  students  are  of  the  sex 
which  some  call  "  weaker,"  but  which  here,  at  any 
rate,  is  shown  to  be  equal  in  endurance,  in  cour- 
age, in  perseverance,  in  devotion  to  study,  and 
in  cheerful  confidence,  to  the  strong  and  stalwart 
men.  The  health  of  the  women  who  are  here 
now  is  in  almost  every  instance  excellent.  I  am 
assured  by  intelligent  ladies  in  all  the  depart- 
ments that  there  is  not  a  single  instance  of 
sickness  which  has  come  from  over-study,  or 
from  any  cause  connected  with  the  routine  of 
the  college  life.  In  one  or  two  cases,  the  incon- 
venience of  a  weak  constitution,  of  weak  eyes 


200  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

and  sensitive  nerves,  has  been  felt ;  and  one  of 
the  most  vigorous  of  the  sisters  has  been  con- 
fined to  her  chamber  for  some  weeks  by  a 
sprained  ankle.  But  it  is  the  unanimous  testi- 
mony, as  I  learn,  of  the  ladies  who  are  studying 
law,  and  medicine,  and  science,  and  the  arts,  in 
the  class-rooms,  and  lecture-rooms,  and  library, 
and  laboratory,  that  their  health  was  never 
better,  that  they  have  had  no  attacks  of  malady, 
and  that  they  ask  for  no  indulgence  on  account 
of  their  sex.  Most  of  them,  indeed,  are  out  of 
their  teens,  and  beyond  the  age  to  which  the 
warnings  of  Dr.  Clarke's  book  apply.  But, 
of  the  twenty  or  more  whom  I  personally  know, 
not  one  complains  ;  and  they  look  to  be  in  better 
health  than  the  average  of  young  women. 

Some  say  that  it  is  too  soon  to  pronounce 
upon  the  success  of  the  experiment  of  co-educa- 
tion here ;  but,  if  the  opinion  of  the  women 
themselves,  and  of  the  teachers  who  teach  them, 
is  to  be  accepted,  the  experiment  in  the  present 
season  is  as  successful  physically  as  it  is  intel- 
lectually. The  women  are  as  strong  and  hearty 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  2OI 

to  all  appearance,  and  have  not  found  their  sex 
an  obstacle  to  their  activity  and  comfort  in 
study.  —  Rev.  C.  H.  Brigtiam,  in  Christian  Reg- 
ister. 


LOMBARD    UNIVERSITY. 

THE  testimony  from  Lombard  University, 
Galesburg,  Illinois,  is  as  follows  :  — 

The  whole  number  of  graduates  is  sixty-nine 
men  and  forty-five  women,  of  whom  twenty- 
eight  of  the  women  have  graduated  during  the 
last  six  years.  There  have  been  no  permanent 
invalids.  Nine  men  and  three  women  have  died. 
Twenty  of  the  women  have  married,  eleven  of 
whom  are  mothers.  The  president,  who  had 
been  here  eighteen  years,  thinks — and,  so  far  as 
I  know,  his  opinion  is  the  opinion  of  all  who  have 
been  connected  with  the  institution  —  that  the 
women  are  as  healthy  as  the  men.  It  frequently 
happens  that  girls  improve  in  health  after  coming 
here ;  and  I  have  heard  two  or  three  of  them 

9* 


202  SEX  AND  EDUCATION. 

say,  after  graduating  and  returning  home,  that 
they  should  be  stronger  if  they  could  come  back 
and  again  have  regular  work  and  a  definite  aim. 


OBERLIN. 
FROM  Oberlin,  Professor  Fairchild  says  :  — 

A  breaking  down  in  health  does  not  appear  to 
be  more  frequent  with  women  than  with  men. 
We  have  not  observed  a  more  frequent  inter- 
ruption of  study  on  this  account,  nor  do  our 
statistics  show  a  greater  draft  upon  the  vital 
forces  in  the  case  of  those  who  have  completed 
the  full  college  course.  Out  of  eighty-four  who 
have  graduated  since  1841,  seven  have  died,  a 
proportion  of  one  in  twelve.  Of  three  hundred 
and  sixty-eight  young  men  who  have  graduated 
in  the  same  time,  thirty-four  are  dead,  or  a  little 
more  than  one  in  eleven.  Of  these  thirty-four 
young  men,  six  fell  in  the  war ;  and,  leaving  out 
those,  the  proportion  of  deaths  remains  one  in 
thirteen.  Taking  the  whole  number  of  graduates, 


SEX  AND  EDUCATION.  203 

omitting  the  theological  department,  we  find  the 
proportion  of  deaths  one  in  nine  and  a  half ;  of 
ladies,  one  in  twelve,  and  this  in  spite  of  the 
lower  average  expectation  of  life  for  women,  as 
indicated  in  Life  Insurance  Tables. 


Cambridge:    Press  of  John  Wilson  and  Son. 


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